Pitch and Fourier magnitude based steganography for hiding 2.4 kbps MELP bitstream

Abstract

In this study, the authors present a new steganographic technique called random least significant bits of pitch and Fourier magnitude steganography (RLPFS). It is based on hiding a secret speech coded by mixed excitation linear prediction (MELP) speech coder in speech bitstream (cover signal), which is also encoded by MELP coder. First, the RLPFS leaks the hidden speech in the following modes: pitch-based steganography, Fourier magnitude-based steganography or both. These modes are selected randomly. Second, during transmission, the stego speech, the mode number, and the number of embedded bits would be transmitted either through a covert channel created in the transmission protocol or through the cover speech. In this work, the authors have dealt with the challenge of embedding a secret speech into a cover speech coded by a very low bit rate speech coder while maintaining a reasonable level of speech quality. They have shown that RLPFS was able to create hidden channels with maximum steganographic bandwidths up to 266.64 bit/s at the cost of a steganographic noise between 0.031 and 0.62 mean opinion score. Also, this study takes into account the security of the parameters, the synchronisation of the receiver to deal with a packet loss during transmission and the resistance of the proposed method against steganalysis.