Rational dither modulation: a novel data-hiding method robust to value-metric scaling attacks

Abstract

A novel quantization-based data-hiding method, named rational dither modulation (RDM), is presented. This method amounts to simple modifications of the well-known dither modulation (DM) scheme, which is largely vulnerable to scaling attacks. With such modifications, RDM becomes invariant to those attacks. Since RDM does not work by trying to estimate the step-size of the quantizers, it does not need any pilot-sequence. Moreover, RDM is suitable for a scalar operation, thus avoiding the cumbersome constructions of spherical codes. It is also shown that RDM approaches the performance of DM asymptotically with the size of the memory needed for the method to operate. Simulation results show the accuracy of our theoretical analysis and the superiority of RDM compared to the improved spread spectrum method.