How Can Reed-Solomon Codes Improve Steganographic Schemes?

The use of syndrome coding in steganographic schemes tends to reduce distortion during embedding. The more complete model comes from the wet papers [FGLS05] which allow to lock positions that cannot be modified. Recently, BCH codes have been investigated, and seem to be good candidates in this context [SW06]. Here, we show that Reed-Solomon codes are twice better with respect to the number of locked positions and that, in fact, they are optimal. We propose two methods for managing these codes in this context: the first one is based on a naive decoding process through Lagrange interpolation; the second one, more efficient, is based on list decoding techniques and provides an adaptive trade-off between the number of locked positions and the embedding efficiency.

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