Signaling methods for multimedia steganography

Conventional communication methods employ a wide variety of signaling techniques that essentially map a bit sequence to a real-valued sequence (which is a representation of a point in the signal constellation). The real-valued sequence is in turn transmitted over a communications channel. However, communication techniques for the purpose of multimedia steganography or data hiding have to transmit the real-valued sequence corresponding to a point in the signal constellation superimposed on the original content (without affecting the fidelity of the original content noticeably). In this paper, we explore practical solutions for signaling methods for multimedia steganography. Data hiding is seen as a sophisticated signaling technique using a periodic signal constellation. We propose such a signaling method and present both theoretical and simulated evaluations of its performance in an additive noise scenario. The problem of optimal choice of the parameters for the proposed technique is also explored, and solutions are presented.