Selecting Optimal Submatrix for Syndrome-Trellis Codes (STCs)-Based Steganography With Segmentation

Syndrome-Trellis Codes (STC), as the de facto state-of-the-art steganography framework, has drawn huge attention recently. However, the original STC merely developed with the general form of cover and message, and almost all the subsequent improvements for STC focused on the cover selection and design of the distortion cost function. How to select the optimal submatrix by the features for the given cover and message is an important issue and requires to be solved urgently. In this work, we propose to divide both the cover and message into segments and embed each message segment into its optimally matched cover segment. We name the proposed method as Segment-STC steganography. Specifically, by investigating the features of the submatrix used in STC, we first select the optimal submatrix, which could effectively reduce the number of distorted elements during the embedding. Then, the given cover and message will be split into a series of segments. Each message segment is adaptively matched with an optimal submatrix. We conduct the experiments on both the benchmark BOSS dataset and our collected on-line songs dataset. The experimental results show that, compared with the original STC, our method could effectively reduce the distortion and improve the undetectability of the stego.