A Novel Turbo Unequal Error Protection Scheme for Image Steganography
Volume 24, Issue 4 (2013), pp. 561–576
Pub. online: 1 January 2013
Type: Research Article
Received
1 December 2011
1 December 2011
Accepted
1 August 2013
1 August 2013
Published
1 January 2013
1 January 2013
Abstract
An Unequal Error Protection (UEP) scheme for image steganography is proposed in this paper. When stego images are transmitted through a noisy channel, the embedded message may be more sensitive to noise than the cover message. Therefore, we propose a Turbo UEP coding scheme for steganographic communication in a noisy channel, which provides higher error protection for the embedded message and lower error protection for the cover message. Simulations show that this coding scheme provides different error protection levels in one coding process and maintains the coding rate constant. In addition, an application scheme of the proposed Turbo UEP code for steganographic communication is presented, and the experimental results show that the extracted secret images have better quality than the cover images after decoding.