Adaptive Steganography in the Noisy Channel with Dual-Syndrome Trellis Codes

Adaptive steganography aims to reduce distortion in the embedding process, typically using Syndrome Trellis Codes (STCs). However, in the case of non-adversarial noise, these are a bad choice: syndrome codes are fragile by design, amplifying the channel error rate into unacceptably-high payload error rates. In this paper we examine the fragility of STCs in the noisy channel, and consider how this can be mitigated if their use cannot be avoided altogether. We also propose an extension called Dual-Syndrome Trellis Codes, that combines error correction and embedding in the same Viterbi process, which slightly outperforms a straight-forward combination of standard forward error correction and STCs.