Secure binary image steganography based on LTP distortion minimization

Abstract

This paper proposes a secure binary image steganography by minimizing the flipping distortion on the statistics of local texture pattern (LTP) and constructing flexible carriers of syndrome-trellis code (STC). Firstly, the change of LTP’s statistic caused by flipping one pixel is employed to measure the flipping distortion of the corresponding pixel, which can well describe the flipping distortion on both statistics and vision. Secondly, we select the non-uniform blocks flexibly and reconstruct them as STC’s carriers, which can access a scalable and nearly continuous capacity upper bound to accommodate to the different secret message lengths. Our experimental results show that, for one specific message length, the security on both statistics and vision is improved significantly when the message length is closed to the capacity upper bound. The comparisons with previous steganographic schemes demonstrate the superiority of the proposed scheme.