Adaptive Audio Steganography Based on Improved Syndrome-Trellis Codes

Abstract

Syndrome-Trellis Code (STC) is a near-optimal convolutional method for adaptive steganography. Hitherto, the existing adaptive steganography commonly depends on the carefully designed distortion cost function, which controls the embedding position of the message in the cover signal. From another point of view, we implement adaptive steganography by improving the STC coding process (named Adaptive-STC). The parity-check matrix is the key to the encoding and extraction process of STC. In this work, we prove that the average embedding change probability of corresponding elements can be changed by adjusting its submatrix. Following that, we specially design an adaptive parity-check matrix to replace the designed distortion cost to restrict the embedding position. The generation of the adaptive parity-check matrix can be formulated as a multi-constrained integer programming problem in which the width of the submatrix is allocated at a fixed height. To solve this particular problem, we propose a targeted intelligent optimization algorithm (named GOAS) that can adaptively generate the parity-check matrix according to different audio cover. The experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art adaptive steganography with reduced embedding changes and improved audio quality while ensuring the ability against steganalysis.