A Compression Resistant Steganography Based on Differential Manchester Code

• Main Authors: Shuai Wang, Ning Zheng, Ming Xu
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2021-01-01
• Series: Symmetry
• Subjects: robust steganography; JPEG compression; differential Manchester code; sign of DCT coefficients
• Online Access: https://www.mdpi.com/2073-8994/13/2/165

In the field of image steganography research, more and more attention is paid to the importance of stego image robustness. In order to make steganography accessible from laboratory to practical applications, it becomes critical that the stego images can resist JPEG compression from transmission channel. In this paper, an image steganography algorithm with strong robustness to resist JPEG compression is proposed. First, the robust cover elements are selected using the sign of DCT coefficients which are kept constant before and after JPEG compression. Additionally, a distortion function and a weighted cost adjustment method are designed to assign an appropriate cost to each candidate DCT coefficient. Finally, the message is embedded in the cover image which has minimal embedding distortion by flipping the signs of DCT coefficients, while differential Manchester code is applied to the element positions to obtain the location feature. Compared with the prior art, our algorithm has better undetectability and stronger robustness, and it can resist the attacks from the social network platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and WeChat.