A Novel Turbo Unequal Error Protection Scheme for Image Steganography

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Mao, Qian^; | Qin, Chuan

Affiliations: School of Optical-Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Shanghai for Science and Technology, No. 516, Jungong Rd., Yangpu, Shanghai 200093, P.R. China, e-mail: maoqiansh@gmail.com, qin@usst.edu.cn

Note: [] Corresponding author.

Abstract: An Unequal Error Protection (UEP) scheme for image steganography is proposed in this paper. When stego images are transmitted through a noisy channel, the embedded message may be more sensitive to noise than the cover message. Therefore, we propose a Turbo UEP coding scheme for steganographic communication in a noisy channel, which provides higher error protection for the embedded message and lower error protection for the cover message. Simulations show that this coding scheme provides different error protection levels in one coding process and maintains the coding rate constant. In addition, an application scheme of the proposed Turbo UEP code for steganographic communication is presented, and the experimental results show that the extracted secret images have better quality than the cover images after decoding.

Keywords: image steganography, unequal error protection, Turbo code, puncture

Journal: Informatica, vol. 24, no. 4, pp. 561-576, 2013