A Robust Image Steganographic Scheme against General Scaling Attacks

Abstract

Conventional covert image communication is assumed to transmit the message, in the securest way possible for a given payload, over lossless channels, and the associated steganographic schemes are generally vulnerable to active attacks, e.g., JPEG re-compression, scaling, as seen on social networks. Although considerable progress has been made on robust steganography against JPEG re-compression, there exist few steganographic schemes capable of resisting to scaling attacks due to the tricky inverse interpolations involved in algorithm design. To tackle this issue, a framework for robust image steganography resisting to scaling with general interpolations either in standard form with fixed interpolation block, or pre-filtering based anti-aliasing implementation with variable block, is proposed in this paper. And the task of robust steganography can be formulated as one of constrained integer programming aiming at perfectly recover the secret message from stego image while minimizing the difference between cover and stego images. By introducing a metric - the degree of pixel involvement (dPI) to identify the modifiable pixels in cover image, the optimization problem above could be effectively solved using branch and bound algorithm (B\&B). In addition, a customized distortion function for scaled stego images is adopted to further boost the security performance. Extensive experiments are carried out which demonstrate that the proposed scheme could not only outperform the prior art in terms of security by a clear margin, but also be applicable to resisting the scaling attacks with various interpolation techniques at arbitrary scaling factors (SFs).