Towards Designing an Effective Complexity Indicator for Audio Steganography

• Main Authors: Zhang, Xueyuan, Wang, Rangding, Dong, Li, Yan, Diqun, Lin, Yuzhen, Wang, Jie
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Subjects: Complexity theory; Convolution; Distortion; Feature extraction; Frequency modulation; Histograms; Kernel
• ISSN: 1938-1883
• DOI: 10.1109/ICC40277.2020.9148992

In the field of steganography, to effectively hide the secret message, it is of great importance to determine which part of the steganographic cover is suitable for embedding. Currently, most of the existing works focus on the image cover, while few works touch the audio cover case. In this work, we attempt to characterize the complexity of audio for selecting the steganographic cover. Specifically, the original cover is first convoluted with a specially designed adaptive convolution kernel. Based on the residual between the original and the convoluted audio, we derive a quantity for measuring the complexity of each frame for a given audio clip. Experimental results verify the usability of the proposed complexity indicator, suggesting high-complexity audio cover is favorable for data embedding. It is also found that the proposed complexity indicator could further boost the steganographic performance of the state-of the-art audio steganography methods. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/capzxy/audio-complexity.