Trellis-coded quantization for public-key steganography

Abstract

This paper deals with public-key steganography in the presence of a passive warden. The aim is to hide secret messages within cover-documents without making the warden suspicious, and without any preliminar secret key sharing. Whereas a practical attempt has been already done to provide a solution to this problem, it suffers of poor flexibility (since embedding and decoding steps highly depend on cover-signals statistics) and of little capacity compared to recent data hiding techniques. Using the same framework, this paper explores the use of trellis-coded quantization techniques (TCQ and turbo TCQ) to design a more efficient public-key scheme. Experiments on audio signals show great improvements considering Cachin's security criterion.