Robust steganography in practical communication: a comparative study

To realize the act of covert communication in a public channel, steganography is proposed. In the current study, modern adaptive steganography plays a dominant role due to its high undetectability. However, the effectiveness of modern adaptive steganography is challenged when being applied in practical communication, such as over social network. Several robust steganographic methods have been proposed, while the comparative study between them is still unknown. Thus, we propose a framework to generalize the current typical steganographic methods resisting against compression attack, and meanwhile empirically analyze advantages and disadvantages of them based on four baseline indicators, referring to as capacity, imperceptibility, undetectability, and robustness. More importantly, the robustness performance of the methods is compared in the real application, such as on Facebook, Twitter, and WeChat, which has not been comprehensively addressed in this community. In particular, the methods modifying sign of DCT coefficients perform more superiority on the social media application.

Automated summary

Steganography can achieve covert communication in public channels, but its effectiveness is challenged in practical applications. This study proposes a framework to generalize and compare different robust steganographic methods, and evaluates their performance in real-world applications, finding that methods modifying the sign of DCT coefficients perform better on social media.