Centralized Error Distribution-Preserving Adaptive Steganography for HEVC

Distortion compensation method is a common way to cope with the distortion drift problem in coefficient domain HEVC steganography. However, it will leave obvious steganographic traces called centralized error (CER). The current coefficient domain HEVC steganography is fragile to CER-based steganalysis. In this article, a novel adaptive HEVC steganography that can resist CER-based steganalysis is proposed. First, the difference of CER between H.264/AVC and HEVC is introduced, and the CER feature in HEVC is re-modeled. Then, from two aspects of overall average distribution and single-frame distribution, we conclude that there is a strong correlation among four components of the CER feature. Last, an adaptive cost function is proposed by maintaining one component distribution to resist steganalysis. Experimental results show that the proposed cost function can effectively improve the security compared with other coefficient-based HEVC steganography. In addition, the proposed steganography outperforms other HEVC steganography in visual quality and bit rate increase.