Reading between the pixels: Photographic steganography for camera display messaging

Abstract

We exploit human color metamers to send light-modulated messages decipherable by cameras, but camouflaged to human vision. These time-varying messages are concealed in ordinary images and videos. Unlike previous methods which rely on visually obtrusive intensity modulation, embedding with color reduces visible artifacts. The mismatch in human and camera spectral sensitivity creates a unique opportunity for hidden messaging. Each color pixel in an electronic display image is modified by shifting the base color along a particular color gradient. The challenge is to find the set of color gradients that maximizes camera response and minimizes human response. Our approach does not require a priori measurement of these sensitivity curves. We learn an ellipsoidal partitioning of the 6-dimensional space of base colors and color gradients. This partitioning creates metamer sets defined by the base color of each display pixel and the corresponding color gradient for message encoding. We sample from the learned metamer sets to find optimal color steps for arbitrary base colors. Ordinary displays and cameras are used, so there is no need for high speed cameras or displays. Our primary contribution is a method to map pixels in an arbitrary image to metamer pairs for steganographic camera-display messaging.