Robust Syndrome-Trellis Codes for Fault-Tolerant Steganography

Syndrome-Trellis Codes (STCs) have been widely used in adaptive steganography due to their high embedding efficiency. However, this type of steganographic codes is sensitive to stego damage, which may be incurred by compression, channel noise, active attacks, and so on, in practical covert communication. In this paper, a construction of robust STCs is proposed to achieve a good balance between robustness and embedding efficiency. The encoder of the proposed scheme performs a specified Error Correction Code (ECC) on the STC’s intermediate outputs. Further, a Viterbi algorithm is suggested to effectively find the optimum stego vector. At the extraction phase, the received stego vector is first decoded by the decoder of the employed ECC and then sent to the STC decoder, which gives the extracted message bits. Experimental results show the proposed scheme presents a good robustness performance, meanwhile the stego remains an acceptable detection resistance against steganalyzers.