A multip-level additive distortion method for security improvement in palette image steganography

Abstract

With the rapid development of the Internet and communication technology, palette images have become a preferred media for steganography. However, the security of palette image steganography faces a big problem. To address this, we propose a multiple-level additive distortion method for security improvement in palette image steganography. The proposed multiple-level additive distortion method comprises an index-level cost method and a pixel-level cost method. The index-level and the pixel-level costs by the two methods can respectively reflect the relationship changes of adjacent indices and the pixels corresponding to the adjacent indices. Meanwhile, the index-level and the pixel-level costs can also reflect the modification impact of steganography. Therefore, the proposed method can improve the security of palette image steganography. We conducted extensive experiments on three datasets to verify the security improvement. Experiment results have shown our proposed multiple-level distortion method indeed has an advantage in security when compared with four state-of-the-art methods.