DST approach to enhance audio quality on lost audio packet steganography

Authors

Qilin Qi, University of Nebraska-LincolnFollow
Dongming Peng, University of Nebraska-LincolnFollow
Hamid Sharif, University of Nebraska-LincolnFollow

Document Type

Article

Date of this Version

2016

Citation

Qi et al. EURASIP Journal on Information Security (2016) 2016:20 DOI 10.1186/s13635-016-0046-z

Comments

© 2016 The Author(s). Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Abstract

Lost audio packet steganography (LACK) is a steganography technique established on the VoIP network. LACK provides a high-capacity covert channel over VoIP network by artificially delaying and dropping a number of packets in use to convey stegnogram. However, the increasing loss of packets will hurt the quality of the VoIP service. The quality deterioration will not only affect the legitimate VoIP service but also constrain the capacity of the covert channel. Discrete spring transform (DST) is proven to be a way to eliminate the perceptual redundancy in the multimedia signal. In this paper, the DST is applied on the LACK so that the perceptual redundancy of the voice frames is suppressed. In this way, the less redundant VoIP frames with perceptual equivalent quality can be transmitted in a channel whose capacity is squeezed by the established covert channel. As a result, the VoIP perceptual quality can be maintained with the existence of the covert channel. Meanwhile, the proposed DST based method demonstrates the possibilities in exploiting the perceptual space of the multimedia signal. The simulation results show that the DST on LACK achieves up to 24 % more capacity over the LACK scheme.