How Reed-Solomon Codes Can Improve Steganographic Schemes

The use of syndrome coding in steganographic schemes tends to reduce distortion during embedding. The more complete model comes from the wet papers (J. Fridrich et al., 2005) and allow to lock positions which cannot be modified. Recently, binary BCH codes have been investigated and seem to be good candidates in this context (D. Schönfeld and A. Winkler, 2006). Here, we show that Reed-Solomon codes are twice better with respect to the number of locked positions; in fact, they are optimal. First, a simple and efficient scheme based on Lagrange interpolation is provided to achieve the optimal number of locked positions. We also consider a new and more general problem, mixing wet papers (locked positions) and simple syndrome coding (low number of changes) in order to face not only passive but also active wardens. Using list decoding techniques, we propose an efficient algorithm that enables an adaptive tradeoff between the number of locked positions and the number of changes.