Pixel-Sensitive and Robust Steganography Based on Polar Codes

TL;DR

This paper introduces a pixel-sensitive, robust steganographic scheme based on polar codes that effectively resists noise attacks and achieves high embedding capacity, demonstrating significant robustness in covert communication.

Contribution

It proposes a novel polar code-based steganography method that is both pixel-sensitive and robust against noise attacks, addressing limitations of existing adaptive steganography techniques.

Findings

Achieves embedding capacity in certain cases.

Maintains a secret message error rate of 10^-5 under noise attacks.

Demonstrates robustness against sophisticated noise scenarios.

Abstract

Steganography is an information hiding technique for covert communication. The core issue in steganography design is the rate-distortion coding problem. Polar codes, which have been proven to achieve the rate-distortion bound for any binary symmetric source, are utilized to design a steganographic scheme that can reach the embedding capacity for the Distortion-Limited Sender problem in certain cases. In adaptive steganography, for attack scenarios where each noise element can have different intensities, existing steganographic coding methods fail to resist such attacks. In this paper, we propose a pixel-sensitive and robust steganographic scheme based on polar codes. Our steganographic scheme not only matches the adaptive distortion well but is also robust against sophisticated noise attacks. Futher, it is proven that our scheme achieves the embedding capacity in certain cases. Experimentally, a steganographic scheme can be designed and implemented with a secret message error rate at the $10^{-5}$ level when the attack noise is known to both the sender and the receiver. This demonstrates its significant robustness.