Title
Natural Steganography in JPEG Domain With a Linear Development Pipeline
Abstract
In order to achieve high practical security, Natural Steganography (NS) uses cover images captured at ISO sensitivity ISO <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">1</sub> and generates stego images mimicking ISO sensitivity ISO <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sub> > ISO <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">1</sub> . This is achieved by adding a stego signal to the cover that mimics the sensor photonic noise. This paper proposes an embedding mechanism to perform NS in the JPEG domain after linear developments by explicitly computing the correlations between DCT coefficients before quantization. In order to compute the covariance matrix of the photonic noise in the DCT domain, we first develop the matrix representation of demosaicking, luminance averaging, pixel section, and 2D-DCT. A detailed analysis of the resulting covariance matrix is done in order to explain the origins of the correlations between the coefficients of 3 × 3 DCT blocks. An embedding scheme is then presented that takes into account all the correlations. It employs 4 sub-lattices and 64 lattices per sub-lattices. The modification probabilities of each DCT coefficient are then derived by computing conditional probabilities computed from a multivariate Gaussian distribution using the Cholesky decomposition of the covariance matrix. This derivation is also used to compute the embedding capacity of each image. Using a specific database called E1Base, we show that in the JPEG domain NS (J-Cov-NS) enables to achieve high capacity (more than 2 bits per non-zero AC DCT) and with high practical security (PE 40% using DCTR and PE 32% using SRNet) from QF 75 to QF 100).
Year
DOI
Venue
2021
10.1109/TIFS.2020.3007354
IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Steganography,JPEG,development pipeline
Journal
16
ISSN
Citations 
PageRank 
1556-6013
1
0.35
References 
Authors
0
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Théo Taburet111.36
Patrick Bas212116.17
Wadih Sawaya3256.35
Jessica Fridrich48014592.05