Simulating suboptimal steganographic embedding

Conference item

Researchers who wish to benchmark the detectability of steganographic distortion functions typically simulate stego objects. However, the difference (coding loss) between simulated stego objects, and real stego objects is significant, and dependent on multiple factors. In this paper, we first identify some factors affecting the coding loss, then propose a method to estimate and correct for coding loss by sampling a few covers and messages. This allows us to simulate suboptimally-coded stego objects which are more accurate representations of real stego objects. We test our results against real embeddings, and naive PLS simulation, showing our simulated stego objects are closer to real embeddings in terms of both distortion and detectability. This is the case even when only a single image and message as used to estimate the loss.

Authors: Kin-Cleaves, C; Ker, AD

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Association for Computing Machinery
• Host title: IH&MMSec '20: Proceedings of the 2020 ACM Workshop on Information Hiding and Multimedia Security
• Pages: 121-126
• Publication date: 2020-06-22
• Acceptance date: 2020-04-12
• Event title: 8th ACM Workshop on Information Hiding and Multimedia Security
• Event location: Virtual event
• Event website: https://www.ihmmsec.org/
• Event start date: 2020-06-22
• Event end date: 2020-06-25
• DOI: 10.1145/3369412.3395071
• ISBN: 978-1-4503-7050-9
• Language: English
• Keywords: syndrome trellis codes; adaptive embedding; steganography; FFR; steganalysis; simulated embedding