Towards Robust Image Steganography

• Published in: IEEE transactions on circuits and systems for video technology Vol. 29; no. 2; pp. 594 - 600
• Main Authors: Tao, Jinyuan, Li, Sheng, Zhang, Xinpeng, Wang, Zichi
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01.02.2019; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Channels; Communication channels; Data mining; Discrete cosine transforms; Distortion; Image coding; Image compression; Image transmission; JPEG compression; JPEG encoders-decoders; Q-factor; robust; Robustness; Social networks; Steganography; Transform coding
• ISSN: 1051-8215; 1558-2205
• DOI: 10.1109/TCSVT.2018.2881118

Posting images on social network platforms is happening everywhere and every single second. Thus, the communication channels offered by various social networks have a great potential for covert communication. However, images transmitted through such channels will usually be JPEG compressed, which fails most of the existing steganographic schemes. In this paper, we propose a novel image steganography framework that is robust for such channels. In particular, we first obtain the channel compressed version (i.e., the channel output) of the original image. Secret data is embedded into the channel compressed original image by using any of the existing JPEG steganographic schemes, which produces the stego-image after the channel transmission. To generate the corresponding image before the channel transmission (termed the intermediate image), we propose a coefficient adjustment scheme to slightly modify the original image based on the stego-image. The adjustment is done such that the channel compressed version of the intermediate image is exactly the same as the stego-image. Therefore, after the channel transmission, secret data can be extracted from the stego-image with 100% accuracy. Various experiments are conducted to show the effectiveness of the proposed framework for image steganography robust to JPEG compression.