Anisotropic distortion cost update strategy in spatial image steganography

In current adaptive steganography study, the distortion function is used to describe pixel modification distortion cost. Distortion cost can describe the influence of pixel modification to the cover. And it plays an important actor in adaptive stegaography. Based on previous researches, in this paper, an Anisotropic Distortion cost Update strategy (ADU strategy) is proposed to adaptively update the initial distortion cost (obtained by HILL .etc) to describe the interaction between multiple embedding modifications more accurately. Based on steanographic security theorty, it is proved that clustering modification strategy can improve steganographic security through theoretical derivation. And through study on steganalysis features, it is analyzed and proved that the determination of optimal modification method of the central pixel is anisotropic and much more complicated. Following these two proofs, the image gradient and thermal conductivity are used to quantify the anisotropy of 4 neighboring pixels. Then the optimal modification method of the central pixel is calculated. Finally, the distortion cost of the central pixel can be updated based on the optimal modification method. Experiments with the optimal embedding simulator show that the ADU strategy has better performance when the scaling factor is 2; the proposed ADU strategy can effectively improve the steganography schemes, especially for steganalytic performance with maxSRMd2 features.