A New SDCS-based Content-adaptive Steganography Using Iterative Noise-Level Estimation

In steganographic technique of "sum and difference covering set" (SDCS), an appropriate SDCS is used to embed data into pixel sequences of cover image. This technique extends the conventional LSB matching and matrix embedding to derive more secure steganography. In this paper, towards stego-security enhancement, a new SDCS-based contentadaptive steganography is proposed. The most noisy pixels are first determined according to an iterative noise-level estimation mechanism. Then, the secret data is embedded into these noisy pixels using SDCS steganography. In addition, a simple while efficient SDCS construction is adopted in our method to improve the embedding efficiency and enhance further the stego-security. The experimental results show that our method provides a better resistance to steganalysis compared with the previous SDCS-based steganography.