A New Parallel Message-distribution Technique for Cost-based Steganography
This work addresses security and efficiency issues in steganography for applications like secure communication, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing cost-based algorithms.
The paper tackled the problem of improving image steganography performance by minimizing distortion, proposing parallel image embedding to prove sub-optimality in existing methods and a new distribution approach that avoids smooth regions, resulting in better security as shown by state-of-the-art steganalysis.
This paper presents two novel approaches to increase performance bounds of image steganography under the criteria of minimizing distortion. First, in order to efficiently use the images' capacities, we propose using parallel images in the embedding stage. The result is then used to prove sub-optimality of the message distribution technique used by all cost based algorithms including HUGO, S-UNIWARD, and HILL. Second, a new distribution approach is presented to further improve the security of these algorithms. Experiments show that this distribution method avoids embedding in smooth regions and thus achieves a better performance, measured by state-of-the-art steganalysis, when compared with the current used distribution.