Derivative-based Steganographic Distortion and Its Non-additive Extensions for Audio

Steganography is the art of covert communication, which aims to hide the secret messages into cover medium while achieving high undetectability. To this end, the framework of minimal distortion embedding is widely adopted for adaptive steganography, where a well-designed distortion function is significant. In this paper, inspired by the phenomenon that the modification of audio samples with the low amplitude will be easily detected, a novel distortion is presented for audio steganography. Taking the fragility of the low amplitude audio samples into account, the proposed distortion is inversely proportional to the amplitude. Furthermore, in order to resist the strong steganalysis, the derivative filter is utilized for acquiring the residual of audio, which plays an important role in distortion definition. The experimental results show that the proposed distortion outperforms the state-of-the-art methods defending strong steganalytic methods. To take a step forward, considering the mutual impact caused by embedding modification, the non-additive extensions of the proposed methods are put forward. The extending experiments show that in most cases, the proposed non-additive extensions can achieve higher level of security than the original methods.