Adaptive Payload Distribution in Multiple Images Steganography Based on Image Texture Features

• Published in: IEEE transactions on dependable and secure computing Vol. 19; no. 2; pp. 897 - 911
• Main Authors: Liao, Xin, Yin, Jiaojiao, Chen, Mingliang, Qin, Zheng
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Washington IEEE 01.03.2022; IEEE Computer Society
• Subjects: Adaptation models; Algorithms; Cloud computing; Cybersecurity; Digital imaging; Distortion; Distribution strategy; Image enhancement; Image steganography; Image texture; image texture features; multiple images; New technology; payload distribution; Payloads; Performance enhancement; Security; Steganography; Texture
• ISSN: 1545-5971; 1941-0018
• DOI: 10.1109/TDSC.2020.3004708

With the coming era of cloud technology, cloud storage is an emerging technology to store massive digital images, which provides steganography a new fashion to embed secret information into massive images. Specifically, a resourceful steganographer could embed a set of secret information into multiple images adaptively, and share these images in cloud storage with the receiver, instead of traditional single image steganography. Nevertheless, it is still an open issue how to allocate embedding payload among a sequence of images for security performance enhancement. This article formulates adaptive payload distribution in multiple images steganography based on image texture features and provides the theoretical security analysis from the steganalyst's point of view. Two payload distribution strategies based on image texture complexity and distortion distribution are designed and discussed, respectively. The proposed strategies can be employed together with these state-of-the-art single image steganographic algorithms. The comparisons of the security performance against the modern universal pooled steganalysis are given. Furthermore, this article compares the per image detectability of these multiple images steganographic schemes against the modern single image steganalyzer. Extensive experimental results show that the proposed payload distribution strategies could obtain better security performance.