Toward a robust and secure echo steganography method based on parameters hopping

Abstract

Echo hiding methods have good perceptual quality and they are robust to intentional and unintentional modifications. Unfortunately these methods are not quite transparent and are not suitable for steganography applications. Specifically, this point became more obvious after a recent steganalysis investigation where both parameters and the hidden message were extracted accurately. This work tries to alleviate this problem by introducing variable parameters into echo hiding methods. The system is tested in both active and passive warden scenarios. Comparing results of conventional and the proposed method shows that for embedding strength of 0.2, the proposed method decreases detection of echo method by 24.2% and increases its robustness to echo attacks by 16.17%.