Design of adaptive steganographic schemes for digital images

Most steganographic schemes for real digital media embed messages by minimizing a suitably defined distortion function. In practice, this is often realized by syndrome codes which offer near-optimal rate-distortion performance. However, the distortion functions are designed heuristically and the resulting steganographic algorithms are thus suboptimal. In this paper, we present a practical framework for optimizing the parameters of additive distortion functions to minimize statistical detectability. We apply the framework to digital images in both spatial and DCT domain by first defining a rich parametric model which assigns a cost of making a change at every cover element based on its neighborhood. Then, we present a practical method for optimizing the parameters with respect to a chosen detection metric and feature space. We show that the size of the margin between support vectors in soft-margin SVMs leads to a fast detection metric and that methods minimizing the margin tend to be more secure w.r.t. blind steganalysis. The parameters obtained by the Nelder-Mead simplex-reflection algorithm for spatial and DCT-domain images are presented and the new embedding methods are tested by blind steganalyzers utilizing various feature sets. Experimental results show that as few as 80 images are sufficient for obtaining good candidates for parameters of the cost model, which allows us to speed up the parameter search.