Double-Domains-Based Covert Communication Scheme for a RS-Code-Based Multiple Description Image Coding System

In this paper, a covert communication scheme is proposed for a RS-code-based multiple description image coding system. Firstly, the secret information is embedded in the carrier image by the double-domains based method. And then the carrier image is encoded with the SPIHT algorithm. The SPIHT stream is delivered through the RS-code-based multiple description image coding system to conquer the channel errors. During the information hiding phase, the embedding order and the embedding parameters are carefully selected to ensure that the secret information can exist in the pixel domain and in the DWT domain peacefully. During the SPIHT encoding phase, the appropriate parameters are selected to balance the compression rate and the visual quality of the recovered carrier image. During the transmission phase, the appropriate structure is selected according to the channel conditions. The experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed covert communication scheme.