TY - JOUR
T1 - A New Distortion Function Design for JPEG Steganography Using the Generalized Uniform Embedding Strategy
AU - Su, Wenkang
AU - Ni, Jiangqun
AU - Li, Xiaohan
AU - Shi, Yun Qing
N1 - Funding Information:
Manuscript received April 8, 2018; revised June 26, 2018 and July 27, 2018; accepted August 9, 2018. Date of publication August 14, 2018; date of current version December 4, 2018. This work was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant 61772573 and Grant U1736215, and in part by the Science and Technology Program of Guangzhou under Grant 201707010029 and Grant 201804010265. This paper was recommended by Associate Editor X. Cao. (Corresponding author: Jiangqun Ni.) W. Su and X. Li are with the School of Electronics and Information Technology, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou 510006, China (e-mail: swk1004@163.com; Julia_lxh@163.com).
Publisher Copyright:
© 1991-2012 IEEE.
Copyright:
Copyright 2018 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.
PY - 2018/12
Y1 - 2018/12
N2 - Nowadays, the most prevailing approach to steganography is the minimal embedding distortion framework, which includes an optimizable distortion function for each cover element and an encoding method to minimize the distortion. With the emergence of Syndrome-Trellis Code, the distortion function plays an increasingly important role in modern adaptive image steganography. In this letter, a new distortion function called generalized uniform embedding distortion (GUED) is proposed for JPEG steganography. The proposed GUED consists of the new distortion measures for both Alternating Current (AC) mode and Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) block, which are represented in a more general exponential model, aiming to flexibly allocate the embedding data so as to minimize the global changes of the statistics of quantized DCT coefficients after embedding. In addition, an empirical rule is developed to determine the parameters of the exponential function according to the payload and quality factor. By exploring the statistics of both DCT and spatial domains, the proposed GUED is shown to be more consistent with the objective of generalized uniform embedding strategy, i.e., maintaining the relative changes of DCT coefficients to be proportional to their coefficients of variations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed GUED gains significant performance improvements when compared with its original UERD, and outperforms the state-of-The-Art J-UNIWARD with markedly reduced computation time.
AB - Nowadays, the most prevailing approach to steganography is the minimal embedding distortion framework, which includes an optimizable distortion function for each cover element and an encoding method to minimize the distortion. With the emergence of Syndrome-Trellis Code, the distortion function plays an increasingly important role in modern adaptive image steganography. In this letter, a new distortion function called generalized uniform embedding distortion (GUED) is proposed for JPEG steganography. The proposed GUED consists of the new distortion measures for both Alternating Current (AC) mode and Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) block, which are represented in a more general exponential model, aiming to flexibly allocate the embedding data so as to minimize the global changes of the statistics of quantized DCT coefficients after embedding. In addition, an empirical rule is developed to determine the parameters of the exponential function according to the payload and quality factor. By exploring the statistics of both DCT and spatial domains, the proposed GUED is shown to be more consistent with the objective of generalized uniform embedding strategy, i.e., maintaining the relative changes of DCT coefficients to be proportional to their coefficients of variations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed GUED gains significant performance improvements when compared with its original UERD, and outperforms the state-of-The-Art J-UNIWARD with markedly reduced computation time.
KW - JPEG steganography
KW - distortion function
KW - uniform embedding
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U2 - 10.1109/TCSVT.2018.2865537
DO - 10.1109/TCSVT.2018.2865537
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85051649390
SN - 1051-8215
VL - 28
SP - 3545
EP - 3549
JO - IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology
JF - IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology
IS - 12
M1 - 8435952
ER -