Portable real-time DCT-based steganography using OpenCL

In this paper, a steganographic method for real-time data hiding is proposed. The main goal of the research is to develop steganographic method with increased robustness to unintentional image processing attacks. In addition, we prove the validity of the method in real-time applications. The method is based on a discrete cosine transform (DCT) where the values of a DCT coefficients are modified in order to hide data. This modification is invisible to a human observer. We further the investigation by implementing the proposed method using different target architectures and analyze their performance. Results show that the proposed method is very robust to image compression, scaling and blurring. In addition, modification of the image is imperceptible even though the number of embedded bits is high. The steganalysis of the method shows that the detection of the modification of the image is unreliable for a lower relative payload size embedded. Analysis of OpenCL implementation of the proposed method on four different target architectures shows considerable speedups.