A Robust Data Embedding Method for MPEG Layer III Audio Steganography

A new method of MP3 steganography is proposed with emphasis on increasing the robustness of data embedding based on the MP3 statistical properties, which used Modified Discrete Cosine Transform (MDCT) to compress these properties. In order to achieve this purpose, modification of selected MDCT coefficients is done through MPEG audio compression procedure. In this algorithm, secret message is embedded directly after achievement of MDCT coefficient and before quantization step in process of MP3 encoder. It is feasible to embed some hidden data by substitution of the least significant bit of the MDCT coefficients during compression of MP3 files. The proposed algorithm performance results show considerable robustness against common audio processing attacks, especially MPEG compression with lower computational complexity compared to MP3Stego. The retrieved hidden message obtained from the algorithm has the highest quality against various steganographic attacks and different signal types which shows an excellent imperceptibility for the new algorithm.