Biblio

Adaptive steganography aims to reduce distortion in the embedding process, typically using Syndrome Trellis Codes (STCs). However, in the case of non-adversarial noise, these are a bad choice: syndrome codes are fragile by design, amplifying the channel error rate into unacceptably-high payload error rates. In this paper we examine the fragility of STCs in the noisy channel, and consider how this can be mitigated if their use cannot be avoided altogether. We also propose an extension called Dual-Syndrome Trellis Codes, that combines error correction and embedding in the same Viterbi process, which slightly outperforms a straight-forward combination of standard forward error correction and STCs.

Leading steganography systems make use of the Syndrome-Trellis Code (STC) algorithm to minimize a distortion function while encoding the desired payload, but this constrains the distortion function to be additive. The Gibbs Embedding algorithm works for a certain class of non-additive distortion functions, but has its own limitations and is highly complex. In this short paper we show that it is possible to modify the STC algorithm in a simple way, to minimize a non-additive distortion function suboptimally. We use it for two examples. First, applying it to the S-UNIWARD distortion function, we show that it does indeed reduce distortion, compared with minimizing the additive approximation currently used in image steganography, but that it makes the payload more – not less – detectable. This parallels research attempting to use Gibbs Embedding for the same task. Second, we apply it to distortion defined by the output of a specific detector, as a counter-move in the steganography game. However, unless the Warden is forced to move first (by fixing the detector) this is highly detectable.