Exploring Frame Difference to Enhance Robustness for Video Steganography on Social Networks

Abstract

The proliferation of video sharing on social networks has created a novel avenue for covert communication. Since most social networking channels are lossy, researchers have devoted efforts to robust video steganography to establish covert communication on social networks. Although there are various methods available, they often overlook the differences between frames in a video and are designed for a single frame. In this paper, we explore the general process of video recompression and present the frame quantization step (FQS) and interframe mutual information (IFMI) to measure the frame difference in the process of video recompression. Based on the two proposed metrics, we design a heuristic frame selection strategy and then propose a new robust video steganographic method in the DWT-SVD domain. Extensive experiments demonstrate that heuristic frame selection can effectively improve the robustness and reduce the computational complexity of video steganography. Our proposed method provides better robustness and higher efficiency than existing methods for building reliable covert communication on social networks, such as YouTube and Vimeo.