Model-based image steganography using asymmetric embedding scheme

Abstract. Recently, some steganographic schemes, which take into account the interaction among adjacent modifications, have emerged to tackle the issue of nonadditive embedding and exhibited higher security when compared with the original additive schemes. However, the performances of these schemes are volatile and very sensitive to both the heuristic parameters and the choice of initial additive distortion functions. We proposed a model-based steganographic scheme, which incorporates the adjacent embedding information without relying on any heuristic parameters. Following the spirit of prior arts, the proposed scheme divides the cover image into several interleaved sublattices and embeds messages on each sublattice sequentially. Adjacent modifications are utilized as a priori knowledge to optimize the asymmetric change probabilities of modifying each pixel by +1 and −1. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme can rival or outperform the prior arts and, moreover, maintains a stable security performance, irrespective of any initial additive distortion or any steganalysis detector.