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High capacity steganographic method based upon JPEG
The two most important aspects of any image-based
steganographic system are the quality of the stegoimage and the capacity of the cover image. This paper proposes a novel and high capacity steganographic approach based on Discrete Cosine Transformation (DCT) and JPEG compression. JPEG technique divides the input image into non-overlapping blocks of 8x8 pixels and uses the DCT transformation. However, our proposed method divides the cover image into nonoverlapping
blocks of 16x16 pixels. For each quantized
DCT block, the least two-significant bits (2-LSBs) of each middle frequency coefficient are modified to embed two secret bits. Our aim is to investigate the data hiding efficiency using larger blocks for JPEG compression. Our experiment result shows that the proposed approach can provide a higher information hiding capacity than Jpeg-Jsteg and Chang et al. methods based on the conventional blocks of 8x8 pixels. Furthermore, the produced stego-images are almost identical to the original cover images
JPEG steganography: A performance evaluation of quantization tables
The two most important aspects of any image based steganographic system are the imperceptibility and the capacity of the stego image. This paper evaluates the performance and efficiency of using optimized quantization tables instead of default JPEG tables within JPEG steganography. We found that using optimized tables significantly improves the quality of stego-images. Moreover, we used this optimization strategy to generate a 16x16 quantization table to be used instead of that suggested. The quality of stego-images was greatly improved when these optimized tables were used. This led us to suggest a new hybrid steganographic method in order to increase the embedding capacity. This new method is based on both and Jpeg-Jsteg methods. In this method, for each 16x16 quantized DCT block, the least two significant bits (2-LSBs) of each middle frequency coefficient are modified to embed two secret bits. Additionally, the Jpeg-Jsteg embedding technique is used for the low frequency DCT coefficients without modifying the DC coefficient. Our experimental results show that the proposed approach can provide a higher information-hiding capacity than the other methods tested. Furthermore, the quality of the produced stego-images is better than that of other methods which use the default tables
Learning Convolutional Networks for Content-weighted Image Compression
Lossy image compression is generally formulated as a joint rate-distortion
optimization to learn encoder, quantizer, and decoder. However, the quantizer
is non-differentiable, and discrete entropy estimation usually is required for
rate control. These make it very challenging to develop a convolutional network
(CNN)-based image compression system. In this paper, motivated by that the
local information content is spatially variant in an image, we suggest that the
bit rate of the different parts of the image should be adapted to local
content. And the content aware bit rate is allocated under the guidance of a
content-weighted importance map. Thus, the sum of the importance map can serve
as a continuous alternative of discrete entropy estimation to control
compression rate. And binarizer is adopted to quantize the output of encoder
due to the binarization scheme is also directly defined by the importance map.
Furthermore, a proxy function is introduced for binary operation in backward
propagation to make it differentiable. Therefore, the encoder, decoder,
binarizer and importance map can be jointly optimized in an end-to-end manner
by using a subset of the ImageNet database. In low bit rate image compression,
experiments show that our system significantly outperforms JPEG and JPEG 2000
by structural similarity (SSIM) index, and can produce the much better visual
result with sharp edges, rich textures, and fewer artifacts
Distributed Representation of Geometrically Correlated Images with Compressed Linear Measurements
This paper addresses the problem of distributed coding of images whose
correlation is driven by the motion of objects or positioning of the vision
sensors. It concentrates on the problem where images are encoded with
compressed linear measurements. We propose a geometry-based correlation model
in order to describe the common information in pairs of images. We assume that
the constitutive components of natural images can be captured by visual
features that undergo local transformations (e.g., translation) in different
images. We first identify prominent visual features by computing a sparse
approximation of a reference image with a dictionary of geometric basis
functions. We then pose a regularized optimization problem to estimate the
corresponding features in correlated images given by quantized linear
measurements. The estimated features have to comply with the compressed
information and to represent consistent transformation between images. The
correlation model is given by the relative geometric transformations between
corresponding features. We then propose an efficient joint decoding algorithm
that estimates the compressed images such that they stay consistent with both
the quantized measurements and the correlation model. Experimental results show
that the proposed algorithm effectively estimates the correlation between
images in multi-view datasets. In addition, the proposed algorithm provides
effective decoding performance that compares advantageously to independent
coding solutions as well as state-of-the-art distributed coding schemes based
on disparity learning
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