Adaptive Quantization Index Modulation Research Articles

Adaptive QIM With Minimum Embedding Cost for Robust Video Steganography on Social Networks

Sharing videos on social networks has become more and more popular, which provides a new scenario for covert communication. Video sharing-based hidden communication can conceal the contact relation between the sender and receiver and achieve the one-to-many delivery of secret messages. However, most video steganographic methods are unable to complete reliable hidden communication on social networks because of lossy video recompression. In this paper, we propose adaptive QIM (Quantization Index Modulation) with minimum embedding cost, which decreases the quantization distortion as much as possible to improve the security performance against steganalysis under the same level of robustness. Furthermore, based on the proposed quantization modulation scheme, we implement two robust steganographic methods in the DWT-SVD domain and the DTCWT-SVD domain. Experimental results show that the overall performance of our proposed modulation scheme outperforms QIM and adaptive QIM. Compared with existing robust video data hiding, two proposed steganographic methods demonstrate superior robustness and security on local lossy channels and social networks.

Adaptive Video Watermarking against Scaling Attacks Based on Quantization Index Modulation

Video watermarking plays a vital role in protecting the video copyright. The quantization-based methods are widely used in the existing watermarking algorithms, owing to their low computational complexity and completely blind extraction. However, most of them work poorly in resisting scaling attacks, by which the quantization value may fall outside the original quantization interval. For addressing this issue, an adaptive quantization index modulation method is proposed. The property that is associated with the ratio of the DC coefficient before and after scaling the video resolution motivates us to select the DC coefficient as the quantization value and set the size of the quantization interval by the video resolution to maintain the synchronization between them before and after scaling. Moreover, a strategy taking advantage of the high decoding reliability of the QRCode is proposed to terminate the extraction in advance, and both the embedding and the extracting process are performed in the spatial domain, which all contribute to further enhance the execution efficiency. The experimental results show that our algorithm outperforms the state-of-the-art method in terms of imperceptibility, robustness, and computational cost.

Frame-synchronous Blind Audio Watermarking for Tamper Proofing and Self-Recovery

This paper presents a lifting wavelet transform (LWT)-based blind audio watermarking scheme designed for tampering detection and self-recovery. Following 3-level LWT decomposition of a host audio, the coefficients in selected subbands are first partitioned into frames for watermarking. To suit different purposes of the watermarking applications, binary information is packed into two groups: frame-related data are embedded in the approximation subband using rational dither modulation; the source-channel coded bit sequence of the host audio is hidden inside the 2nd and 3rd -detail subbands using 2N-ary adaptive quantization index modulation. The frame-related data consists of a synchronization code used for frame alignment and a composite message gathered from four adjacent frames for content authentication. To endow the proposed watermarking scheme with a self-recovering capability, we resort to hashing comparison to identify tampered frames and adopt a Reed–Solomon code to correct symbol errors. The experiment results indicate that the proposed watermarking scheme can accurately locate and recover the tampered regions of the audio signal. The incorporation of the frame synchronization mechanism enables the proposed scheme to resist against cropping and replacement attacks, all of which were unsolvable by previous watermarking schemes. Furthermore, as revealed by the perceptual evaluation of audio quality measures, the quality degradation caused by watermark embedding is merely minor. With all the aforementioned merits, the proposed scheme can find various applications for ownership protection and content authentication.

SVD-Based Adaptive QIM Watermarking on Stereo Audio Signals

This paper proposes a blind digital audio water- marking algorithm that utilizes the quantization index modulation (QIM) and the singular value decomposition (SVD) of stereo audio signals. Conventional SVD-based blind audio watermarking algorithms lack physical interpretation since the matrix construction method for the input matrix for SVD is heuristically defined. However, in the proposed approach, because the SVD is directly applied to the stereo input signals, the resulting decomposed elements convey a conceptually meaningful inter- pretation of the original audio signal. As the proposed approach effectively utilizes the ratio of singular values, the embedded watermark is highly imperceptible and robust against volumetric scaling attacks; most QIM-based watermarking schemes are weak to these types of attacks. Experimental results under well-known practical attacks, such as compressions, resampling, and various types of signal processing, confirm that the proposed algorithm performs well compared to conventional audio watermarking algorithms.

Adaptive Quantization Index Modulation Audio Watermarking based on Fuzzy Inference System

Many of the adaptive watermarking schemes reported in the literature consider only local audio signal properties. Many schemes require complex computation along with manual parameter settings. In this paper, we propose a novel, fuzzy, adaptive audio watermarking algorithm based on both global and local audio signal properties. The algorithm performs well for dynamic range of audio signals without requiring manual initial parameter selection. Here, mean value of energy (MVE) and variance of spectral flux (VSF) of a given audio signal constitutes global components, while the energy of each audio frame acts as local component. The Quantization Index Modulation (QIM) step size Δ is made adaptive to both the global and local features. The global component automates the initial selection of Δ using the fuzzy inference system while the local component controls the variation in it based on the energy of individual audio frame. Hence Δ adaptively controls the strength of watermark to meet both the robustness and inaudibility requirements, making the system independent of audio nature. Experimental results reveal that our adaptive scheme outperforms other fixed step sized QIM schemes and adaptive schemes and is highly robust against general attacks.

Incorporation of perceptually adaptive QIM with singular value decomposition for blind audio watermarking

This paper presents a novel approach for blind audio watermarking. The proposed scheme utilizes the flexibility of discrete wavelet packet transformation (DWPT) to approximate the critical bands and adaptively determines suitable embedding strengths for carrying out quantization index modulation (QIM). The singular value decomposition (SVD) is employed to analyze the matrix formed by the DWPT coefficients and embed watermark bits by manipulating singular values subject to perceptual criteria. To achieve even better performance, two auxiliary enhancement measures are attached to the developed scheme. Performance evaluation and comparison are demonstrated with the presence of common digital signal processing attacks. Experimental results confirm that the combination of the DWPT, SVD, and adaptive QIM achieves imperceptible data hiding with satisfying robustness and payload capacity. Moreover, the inclusion of self-synchronization capability allows the developed watermarking system to withstand time-shifting and cropping attacks.

주파수 위상 응답과 크기 응답에 QIM을 이용한 다중 오디오 워터마킹

This paper describes a multiple audio watermarking using Quantization Index Modulation (QIM) on frequency phase and magnitude response. Proposed embedding procedure is composed of two stage. At the first stage, the watermark is embedded on the frequency phase response using QIM. In the second stage, the watermark is embedded using adaptive QIM with the step-size that is adaptively determined using the maximum value of the frequency magnitude response of every frame. The watermark is extracted by calculating the Euclidean distance as the blind detection. The proposed method is robust against most of attacks of audio watermark benchmarking. For the Fourier attacks, the proposed method shows over 95% recovery rate.

A Perceptually Adaptive QIM Scheme for Efficient Watermark Synchronization

This study presents an adaptive quantization index modulation scheme applicable on a small audio segment, which in turn allows the watermarking technique to withstand time-shifting and cropping attacks. The exploitation of auditory masking further ensures the robustness and imperceptibility of the embedded watermark. Experimental results confirmed the efficacy of this scheme against common signal processing attacks.

Data hiding based quality access control of digital images using adaptive QIM and lifting

This paper proposes a joint data-hiding and data modulation scheme to serve the purpose of quality access control of image(s) using quantization index modulation (QIM). The combined effect of external information embedding and data modulation cause visual degradation and may be used in access control through reversible process. The degree of deterioration depends on the amount of external data insertion, amount of data modulation as well as step size used in QIM. A weight function ( q) and the quantization step size ( Δ b ) of JPEG 2000 are used for defining the step size of QIM. Lifting based discrete wavelet transform (DWT), instead of conventional DWT, is used to decompose the original image in order to achieve advantages, namely low loss in image quality due to QIM, better watermark decoding reliability and high embedding capacity for a given embedding distortion. At the decoder, data are demodulated first and watermark bits are then extracted using minimum distance decoding. Extracted watermark is used to suppress self-noise (SN) that provides better quality of image. Simulation results have shown that an improvement in peak-signal-to-noise-ratio (PSNR), mean structural-similarity-index-measure (MSSIM) and Watson distance by an amount of about 30%, 12% and 77%, respectively, are gained by authorized user when 50% coefficients of high–high (HH) coefficients are modulated.

Audio watermarking based on quantization index modulation using combined perceptual masking

In this paper, a robust audio watermarking scheme for MPEG-1/ Audio Layer II compressed domain is proposed. The scheme is implemented by modifying the subband coefficients using adaptive quantization index modulation. The watermarking procedure exploits perceptual frequency and temporal masking of the human auditory system (HAS) of MPEG coder to satisfy the requirements of robustness, security and transparency. This reduces the computational complexity of proposed scheme. The paper investigates the use of elevated masking threshold to improve detection and achieve higher robustness against re-encoding and awgn attacks. Experimental results show that high capacity of 6,840 bps with ODG ?0.5 without altering the MPEG/audio bitrate.