A study on embedding efficiency of matrix encoding

In this paper, the authors examine embedding efficiency, which influences the most concerned performance of steganography, security, directly. Embedding efficiency is defined as the number of random message bits embedded per embedding change. Recently, matrix embedding has gained extensive attention because of its outstanding performance in boosting steganographic schemes' embedding efficiency. Firstly, the authors evaluate embedding change not only on the number of changed coefficients but also on the varying magnitude of changed coefficients. Secondly, embedding efficiency of matrix embedding with different radixes is formularized and investigated. A conclusion is drawn that ternary matrix embedding can achieve the highest embedding efficiency.