A New Payload Partition Strategy in Color Image Steganography

• Published in: IEEE transactions on circuits and systems for video technology Vol. 30; no. 3; pp. 685 - 696
• Main Authors: Liao, Xin, Yu, Yingbo, Li, Bin, Li, Zhongpeng, Qin, Zheng
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01.03.2020; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Algorithms; Channels; Color; Color imagery; Correlation; Distortion; Embedding; Gray-scale; Image color analysis; Image detection; Image enhancement; Image steganography; modification probabilities; Partitions; payload partition; Payloads; Performance enhancement; RGB channels; Security; Steganography; Strategy
• ISSN: 1051-8215; 1558-2205
• DOI: 10.1109/TCSVT.2019.2896270

In traditional steganographic schemes, RGB three channels payloads are assigned equally in a true color image. In fact, the security of color image steganography relates not only to data-embedding algorithms but also to different payload partition. How to exploit inter-channel correlations to allocate payload for performance enhancement is still an open issue in color image steganography. In this paper, a novel channel-dependent payload partition strategy based on amplifying channel modification probabilities is proposed, so as to adaptively assign the embedding capacity among RGB channels. The modification probabilities of three corresponding pixels in RGB channels are simultaneously increased, and thus the embedding impacts could be clustered, in order to improve the empirical steganographic security against the channel co-occurrences detection. The experimental results show that the new color image steganographic schemes, incorporated with the proposed strategy, can effectively make the embedding changes concentrated mainly in textured regions, and achieve better performance on resisting the modern color image steganalysis.