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A steganographic method based on gain quantization for iLBC speech streams

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Abstract

Under the premise of ensuring good speech quality and resistance to steganalysis, how to embed as much information as possible into low-bit-rate speech is a challenge. The existing research mainly focuses on least significant bits in the compressed speech streams or line spectral frequencies in the encoding processes of the G.723.1 and G.729a codecs. In this paper, we are concentrating on steganography in Internet Low Bitrate Codec speech streams. Specifically, we present a novel steganographic method on the basis of the gain quantization (GQS), which is included in the vector quantization of dynamic codebooks. The secret information is embedded by modifying the search range of the gain codebook to quantize the gain value. The experimental results show that the proposed GQS method achieves a higher hiding capacity, less signal distortion, and better resistance to steganalysis.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant no. 61573125, in part by the MOE (Ministry of Education in China) Project of Humanities and Social Sciences under Grant nos. 19YJC870021 and 18YJC870025, and in part by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities under Grant nos. PA2019GDQT0008 and JZ2018YYPY0288. The authors would like to thank the Editors and anonymous referees for their insightful comments and suggestions.

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Correspondence to Guofu Zhang.

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Communicated by J. Dittmann.

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Su, Z., Li, W., Zhang, G. et al. A steganographic method based on gain quantization for iLBC speech streams. Multimedia Systems 26, 223–233 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00530-019-00624-w

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