A Robust MP3 Steganographic Method against Multiple Compressions Based on Modified Discrete Cosine Transform

Abstract

MP3 appears in various social networking sites wildly, and it is very suitable to be applied for covert communication indeed. However, almost all social networking sites recompress the uploaded MP3 files, which leads to the ineffectiveness of the existing MP3 steganographic methods. In this paper, a robust MP3 steganographic algorithm is proposed with the ability of multiple compressions resistance. First, we discover a new embedding domain with strong robustness. The scalefactor bands of higher energy are applied as the embedding bands. The message bits are embedded by adjusting the position of the MDCT coefficients with the largest magnitude in the embedding bands. Besides, the embedding and extraction operations are realized in the process of MP3 decoding at the same time. Experimental results illustrate that our proposed method is of strong robustness against multiple MP3 compressions. The bit error rate is less than 1% at the MP3 bitrate of 320 kbps. It is worth mentioning that the proposed method is proved to be applicable to social networking sites, such as SoundCloud, for covert communication. Our method achieves a satisfactory level of embedding capacity, imperceptibility, and undetectability.

Effectiveness of MP3 Coding Depends on the Music Genre: Evaluation Using Semantic Differential Scales

“…Two more features that the user can control and affect the size and quality are the sampling rate, which is determined by the MPEG-1 protocol at 32 kHz, 44.1 kHz and 48 kHz [12], and the channel mode, with four supported choices: monophonic mode, stereo mode, dual-monophonic mode (identical to stereo mode) and joint stereo mode [13]. Some studies have suggested improvements on the MP3 algorithm, in terms of encryption [14], prevention of multiple compression [15], improved over-the-Internet transmission [16] and also for improving the quality of low bitrate files [17].…”