A new cost function for spatial image steganography based on 2D-SSA and WMF.

Xie, Guoliang; Ren, Jinchang; Marshall, Stephen; Zhao, Huimin; Li, Huihui

Abstract

As an essential tool for secure communications, adaptive steganography aims to communicate secret information with the least security cost. Inspired by the Ranking Priority Profile (RPP), we propose a novel two-step cost function for adaptive steganography in this paper. The RPP mainly includes three rules, i.e. Complexity-First rule, the Clustering rule and the Spreading rule, to design a cost function. We use the two-dimensional Singular Spectrum Analysis (2D-SSA) and Weighted Median Filter (WMF) in designing the two-step cost function. The 2D-SSA is employed in selecting the key components and clustering the embedding positions, which follows the Complexity-First rule and the Clustering rule. Also, we deploy the Spreading rule to smooth the resulting image produced by 2D-SSA with WMF. Extensive experiments have shown the efficacy of the proposed method, which has improved performance over four benchmarking approaches against non-shared selection channel attack. It also provides comparable performance in selection-channel-aware scenarios, where the best results are observed when the relative payload is 0.3 bpp or larger. Besides, the proposed approach is much faster than other model-based methods.

Citation

XIE, G., REN, J., MARSHALL, S., ZHAO, H. and LI, H. 2021. A new cost function for spatial image steganography based on 2D-SSA and WMF. IEEE access [online], 9, pages 30604-30614. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2021.3059690

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Feb 11, 2021
• Online Publication Date: Feb 18, 2021
• Publication Date: Feb 26, 2021
• Deposit Date: Feb 26, 2021
• Publicly Available Date: Feb 26, 2021
• Journal: IEEE Access
• Electronic ISSN: 2169-3536
• Publisher: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 9
• Pages: 30604-30614
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/access.2021.3059690
• Keywords: Image steganography; Feature extraction; Singular spectrum analysis (SSA); Weighted median filtering (WMF); Ranking priority profile; Cost function; Security; Tools; Payloads; Distortion; Spectral analysis; Matrix decomposition
• Public URL: https://rgu-repository.worktribe.com/output/1223835