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Improving security of quantization-index-modulation steganography in low bit-rate speech streams

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Abstract

In this study, we mainly concentrate on quantization-index-modulation (QIM) steganography in low bit-rate speech streams, and contribute to improve its security. Exploiting the characteristics of codebook division diversity in the complementary neighbor vertices algorithm, we first design a key-based codebook division strategy, which follows Kerckhoff’s principle and provides a better security than the previous QIM approach. Further, to resist the state-of-the-art steganalysis, following a general belief that fewer and smaller cover changes are less detectable and more secure, we present an improved QIM steganography, which introduces random position selection to adjust the embedding rate dynamically, and employs matrix encoding strategy to enhance the embedding efficiency. The proposed approach is evaluated with ITU-T G.723.1 as the codec of cover speech and compared with the previous work. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms the traditional QIM approach on both steganographic transparency and steganalysis resistance. Moreover, it is worth pointing out that our approach can effectively work in conjunction with not only G.723.1 codec but also all other parametric speech coders, and be successfully applied into Voice-over-Internet-Protocol systems.

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Notes

  1. The parameters of SVM are set as c = 20, g = 20 in each experiment.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported in part by the Natural Science Foundation of Fujian Province of China under Grant No. 2011J05151, the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities under Grant No. JB-ZR1220, the Scientific Research Foundation of Huaqiao University under Grant No. 11BS210, the Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant No. 61202468, and the Platform Construction Project for Scientific and Technological Innovation of Fujian Province of China under Grant No. 2012H2101. The authors wish to thank anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions that improved this paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Computer Science and Technology, National Huaqiao University, Xiamen, 361021, China

    Hui Tian & Jin Liu

  2. School of Computer Science and Technology, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, 430074, China

    Jin Liu

  3. Haikou Laboratory, Institute of Acoustics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Haikou, 570105, China

    Songbin Li

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  1. Hui Tian
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  2. Jin Liu
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Correspondence to Hui Tian.

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Tian, H., Liu, J. & Li, S. Improving security of quantization-index-modulation steganography in low bit-rate speech streams. Multimedia Systems 20, 143–154 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00530-013-0302-8

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