2009 Data Compression Conference

DCT DOMAIN MESSAGE EMBEDDING IN SPREAD-SPECTRUM STEGANOGRAPHY SYSTEM Neha Agrawal, Anubha Gupta Netaji Subhas Institute of Technology, New Delhi - 110075 nehagrawal.nsit@gmail.com, anubha@coe.nsit.ac.in Abstract Spread-spectrum steganographic (SSIS) method offers high payload and robustness to additive noise in transmission channel but the visual quality of image is distorted and exact data recovery may not be satisfied. DCT-domain message hiding based steganographic techniques provide high image imperceptibility and exact data recovery in absence of noise. In this paper, we combined the best of SSIS and DCT-domain hiding to provide high image imperceptibility and robustness to noise. We demonstrate our proposed algorithm through experiments on additive noise and jpeg compression attacks in the transmitted channel. 1. DCT-Domain Message Embedding in Spread-Spectrum Steganography Steganography means to hide data in a cover image to such that the very existence of information is hidden [3]. A requirement for steganographic system is that the data extraction method be blind to cover signal. Spread spectrum image steganography (SSIS) [2] is one such method. SSIS method encrypts and modulates data, and adds it to cover image to generate stego-image. SSIS is robust to channel attack but the associated filtering operation in data extraction does not guarantee exact recovery. Least Bit Hiding (LSB) in image pixel domain and data hiding in Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT)[3] domain are other potential methods for steganography which are not as robust to noise but offer better image imperceptibility and error free recovery of embedded data in absence of noise. In this work, we combine DCT hiding in SSIS method by digitizing the modulated message from SSIS and hiding them in image DCT blocks. We observed that interchanging (1,3} and (3,1) element in an 8*8 DCT block does not visually change image. We used the this property to hide bits in DCT blocks. To hide a bit 1, we ensure that in stego-image (1,3) element in its DCT blocks is greater than (3,1) element, if not we interchange (1,3) and (3,1) elements, and vice-versa for hiding bit 0. We did experiments to compare visual quality of stego-image, and data recovery in additive noise and image compression. We observed that DCT embedding provided much better visual performance than SSIS, it worked as well as SSIS under low SNR but did much better under medium and high SNR conditions. In Conclusion, we proposed to solve the joint problem of image imperceptibility and data recovery by embedding the modulated message from SSIS in by image DCT blocks by exploiting redundancies in DCT coefficients. 2. References
[1] N. F. Johnson, and S. Katzenbeisser, A survay of steganographic techniques, in S. Katzenbeisser and F. Petitcolas (Eds.): Information Hiding, pp 4378. Artech House, Norwood, MA, 2000. [2] L. M. Marvel, C. G. Boncelet, Jr., and Charles T. Retter, Spread Spectrum Image Steganograpy, in IEEE Trans. on Image Process., vol. 8, no. 8, pp. 1075 1083, August 1999. [6] F. Shih, Digital Watermarking and Steganography : Fundamentals and Techniques, CRC Press, 2008.
1068-0314/09 $25.00 2009 IEEE DOI 10.1109/DCC.2009.86 433