Distortion-free steganography for polygonal meshes

We present a technique for steganography in polygonal meshes. Our method hides a message in the indexed representation of a mesh by permuting the order in which faces and vertices are stored. The permutation is relative to a reference ordering that encoder and decoder derive from the mesh connectivity in a consistent manner. Our method is distortion-free because it does not modify the geometry of the mesh. Compared to previous stegano-graphic methods for polygonal meshes our capacity is up to an order of magnitude better. Our steganography algorithm is universal and can be used instead of the standard permutation steganography algorithm on arbitrary datasets. The standard algorithm runs in Ω(n² log² nloglogn) time and achieves optimal O(nlogn) bit capacity on datasets with n elements. In contrast, our algorithm runs in O(n) time, achieves a capacity that is only one bit per element less than optimal, and is extremely simple to implement.