Robustness analysis of a digital audio steganographic method based on phase manipulation

In this paper, we discuss the robustness of a digital audio steganographic technique, originally presented in Xiaoxiao et al. (2004), that encodes hidden data through manipulation of the relative phase of harmonically related components of a host audio signal. The method described is aurally transparent for stego-data transmission rates up to 160 bits/sec. The data also survives MP3 compression-decompression as well as digital to analog to digital conversion. In the latter case bit error rates of 10% have been achieved which, with appropriate forward error correction, would enable robust steganographic communication.