Journal of Real-Time Image Processing (2019) 16:601–609

https://doi.org/10.1007/s11554-018-0822-8

SPECIAL ISSUE PAPER

Efficient halftone image steganography based on dispersion degree

optimization
Yingjie Xue1 · Wanteng Liu1 · Wei Lu1,2 · Yuileong Yeung1 · Xianjin Liu1 · Hongmei Liu1

Received: 19 June 2018 / Accepted: 13 September 2018 / Published online: 21 September 2018
© Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2018

Abstract
Halftone images are usually used in facsimile and halftone image steganography can be used for facsimile channel. In recent
years, real-time image processing becomes more and more important. In this paper, an efficient block-based steganographic
method for halftone images is proposed. This method is based on optimal dispersion degree (DD), which can measure the
complexity of the region texture. To reduce the visual distortion, the blocks with complex texture can be selected as carriers
according to the dispersion degree. Finally, the secret messages are embedded by flipping the pixels that can minimize the
changes of texture structure. The experiments demonstrate that the proposed scheme maintains a good image visual quality
and realizes acceptable statistical security with high capacity.

Keywords Steganography · Halftone images · Dispersion degree · Efficient

1 Introduction and compression scheme by employing side match vector

Steganography is a practice of covert communication using
hiding messages. With the development of digital multime-
dia, digital image has become an important carrier for cov-
ert communication. In recent years, many steganographic
schemes have been proposed for digital images [6, 8, 11,
16, 21, 27]. In recent years, many steganography schemes
in grayscale image have been proposed. Qin et al. [24] pro-
posed a prediction-based reversible steganographic scheme
based on image inpainting. By employing the adaptive
strategy for choosing reference pixels and the inpainting
predictor, they could achieve great embedding rate and
visual quality. Qin et al. [23] provided a joint data-hiding
* Wei Lu
luwei3@mail.sysu.edu.cn
Yingjie Xue
xueyj@mail2.sysu.edu.cn
Wanteng Liu
liuwt25@mail2.sysu.edu.cn
1
Guangdong Key Laboratory of Information Security
Technology, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou 510006,
China
2
State Key Laboratory of Information Security Institute
of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences,
Beijing 100093, China
quantization (SMVQ) and image inpainting to achieve high
steganographic performance. Compared to grayscale images,
binary images have their unique binary properties, so steg-
anography in binary image is completely different from in
grayscale images. Halftone image is a special kind of binary
image, which simulates grayscale using scattered black and
Bas2011white points. For the small storage space and the
similar visual performance as grayscale images, halftone
images can be used in facsimile.
For the purpose of imperceptibility for halftone images,
many state-of-the-art embedding methods have been pro-
posed [13–15, 22]. In [22], the secret messages are embed-
ded with phase shifting. Guo and Tsai [14] use a trained
quality-noise look-up table and optimized multipliers to
control the additive noise strength. To simulate the noise,
the secret messages can be embedded with good visual
quality. The schemes above need to use original grayscale
images as reference images, but the original grayscale
images are not provided in common scenarios. Another
category of halftone image steganographic methods
embeds messages in generated halftone images without the
original grayscale images. Fu and Au proposed a block-
based method (denoted as DHSPT) where pseudo-ran-
domly pixels are selected in the halftone image with inten-
sity and connection selection [13]. Guo and Zhang [15]
proposed a block-based method that employs a Grouping

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602 Journal of Real-Time Image Processing (2019) 16:601–609

Index Matrix (denoted as GIM) to embed secret messages 2 Proposed approach

by changing pixels in pairs. Since the original grayscale
images are not provided in general case, it is necessary to The proposed method is presented in this section. We first
focus on the latter scenario. This paper discusses steganog- proposed the measurement of dispersion of one block.
raphy for generated halftone images. Based on this concept, we proposed a strategy of select-
Visual quality is an important criteria for halftone ing carriers. The messages are embedded into the carriers
images steganography. Halftone images are generated by by flipping pixels. Herein, we proposed a strategy of pixel
digital halftoning [25] which display grayscale images flipping to minimize the changes of the block structure.
with two-tone texture pattern. This process makes the
properties of halftone images different from that of gray-
scale images. Unlike grayscale images, each pixel of half- 2.1 Dispersion degree
tone images only has 1 bit. Flipping pixels to embed mes-
sages are easier to cause remarkable noise. To convince Most halftone images are generated by error diffusion [12,
people of the authenticity of the stego halftone image, the 17], which use scattered black and white points to simulate
visual quality needs to be acceptable. Hence, the typi- grayscale. Although grayscale can be seen from halftone
cal halftone steganographic methods, DHSPT and GIM images, halftone images have only two kinds of pixels:
mainly focus on the visual quality. In recent years, many black (0) and white (1).
steganalysis methods [3, 4, 19, 20] have proposed for digi- As shown in Fig. 1, the textures of halftone images in dif-
tal image steganography. Hence, the security of statistic ferent regions have different complexity. Generally, regions
is another important criteria for halftone steganography. with complex texture are the ideal embedding positions,
In this paper, we introduce two popular staganalyzers to because flipping some pixels in these regions are impercep-
evaluate the performance of DHSPT, GIM and the pro- tible in vision. However, there are no method to measure
posed method. the complexity of texture in one region for halftone images.
In recent years, many efficient methods [9, 10, 26] for Fu and Au [13] proposed some assessments to measure the
binary images are proposed. For the practicability, the effi- visual quality for halftone images. They think the distor-
ciency is also important. Herein, the real-time embedding tion due to the message embedding appears mainly in the
and extracting can make the steganography more practical. form of salt-and-pepper artifacts due to local clusters of
In this paper, a novel efficient steganographic method for pixels. Inspired by this, we think that the regions with high
halftone images is proposed, which achieves high capac- dispersion can be changed without incurring obvious noise
ity without sacrificing visual quality. Generally, embedding because it can minimize the amount and the size of the salt-
message in a uniform region can create significant noise and-pepper clusters. To this end, we propose the dispersion
visually while it is imperceptible if the message is embed- degree (denoted as DD) to measure the complexity of the
ded in a non-uniform region with complex texture. There- region texture. Before introducing the concept of block dis-
fore, we choose to embed message in a complex region of persion, we first define the dispersion values of pixels.
cover image. To quantify the texture complexity of the half-
tone image, we propose the concept of dispersion degree.
To begin with, the cover image is divided into some non-
overlapped blocks. Based on dispersion degree, the blocks
with high dispersion degree can be selected as carriers
since embedding message in complex regions can improve
visual quality. For each carrier, a pixel flipping strategy is
employed to minimize the changes of texture structure so
that the anti-steganalysis security is guaranteed. The experi-
ment results show that the visual quality of the proposed
scheme is good and the statistical security is acceptable.
The reminder of this paper is organized as follows. In
Sect. 2, the concept of dispersion degree is proposed for
halftone images and the embedding positions are selected by
optimal dispersion degree. In Sect. 3, the proposed stegano-
graphic scheme is presented. In Sect. 4, comparison experi-
ments about visual quality and the statistical security are
presented. Finally, in Sect. 5, the conclusion of this paper
is given. Fig. 1  Halftone image of “Baboom”

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Journal of Real-Time Image Processing (2019) 16:601–609
Consider one pixel k and its neighbors in a 3 × 3 neigh-
borhood. In order from top to bottom and from left to
right, the pixels in the neighborhood are sequentially
denoted as s1 to s9 with s5 being the pixel k at center. The
dispersion value d(k) of the pixel k is defined as:
∑
9
i anography schemes. They focus on finding the flipping posi-
d(k) = 𝛼 (−1) f (s5 , si ),
i=1
where f is defined as follows:
⎧ 1 − �p(x) − p(y)� i = 1,3,7,9
⎪
f (x, y) = ⎨ 0 i=5
⎪ �p(x) − p(y)� i = 2,4,6,8
⎩
and p(x) denotes the pixel value of the pixel x. The 𝛼 (−1)
denotes the weight for the neighbors of pixel k. A larger
weight is given to the 4-neighborhood (left, right, top, bot-
tom) since they are closer to the pixel k. The 𝛼 is an adjust-
ment parameter which is larger than 1. The larger the 𝛼 is
set, the greater the difference in weights of the neighbors is.
The dispersion value of pixel describes the distribution of its
surrounding pixels relative to itself. The more scattered the
surrounding pixels are distributed with respect to the center
pixel, the greater the dispersion value of the center pixel is.
Assume that the size of one block is m × n , then the
dispersion degree (DD) of the block is equal to the sum
of the dispersion values of each pixel within the block,
which is defined as:
∑
m×n
D= d(k).
k=1
Considering some examples in Fig. 2, from left to right, the
dispersion degree of blocks increases. We can see that the
pixel distribution in blocks with high dispersion degree is
more decentralized, which means that the texture is more
complex. On the other hand, the blocks with uniform texture
have lower dispersion degree.
Fig. 2  Dispersion degree of sample patterns from “Baboom”. The
patterns in the red box are the selected patterns in the five example
patterns. The numbers under the blocks are dispersion degrees (DD)
which are calculated by Eq. (3)
603
2.2 Blocks selection
Almost all the halftone image steganographic schemes adopt
block-based strategy. They divide the cover image into non-
overlapped blocks and then embed message in all of them.
DHSPT [13] and GIM [15] are two typical block-based steg-
(1)
tion with good visual quality in each block.
Generally, not all blocks are suitable for embedding
message. The uniform block can easily introduce disturb-
ing noise if we flip a pixel in it, while non-uniform block is
not sensitive to distortion. So we are supposed to filter out
(2) the suitable block before finding the best flipping pixel. For
the better visual quality, an image block filtering strategy is
proposed in this paper.
Dispersion degree can indicate the texture complexity of
i
an image area and the distribution of pixels. High dispersion
degree means that the texture of the area is very complicated
and the pixel distribution is very scattered. The more uni-
form the image block is, the lower the dispersion degree is.
If we flip pixels in areas with high dispersion degree, it is
hard to be noticed by human eyes. Therefore, we can select
the suitable blocks by the dispersion degree.
A threshold of dispersion is needed to filter the image
blocks. Image blocks with dispersion above the threshold
will be retained and the rest will be discarded. Different
cover images have different thresholds because each cover
image has a different dispersion distribution. Therefore, the
threshold is adaptively derived from the embedded capacity
and the specific cover image. As shown in Fig. 2, there are
some example patterns from “Baboom” and the patterns in
(3) the red box are the selected patterns as carriers.
2.3 Pixel flipping strategy
After selecting the suitable blocks according to the disper-
sion degree, we can embed the message by forcing the parity
of the number of black pixels in blocks. Parity embedding is
a commonly used method of data hiding [2, 5, 6]. When the
parity of the block pixel is inconsistent with the correspond-
ing message bit, the parity needs to be modified by flipping
a pixel within the block.
Flipping different pixels in the same block will lead to
different visual quality and statistical security of anti-stega-
nalysis. For the best performance of steganography, we need
to design an optimal pixel flipping strategy.
The scatter structure of the halftone image makes it more
difficult to embed message. Flipping one pixel at a random
position will bring disturbing noise, and it is easy to destroy
the structural correlation between the blocks and hence
reduce the security. To maintain the original texture and
structure of the halftone image, we need to minimize the
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destruction of the association of the image blocks caused
by the pixel flipping.
Image texture consists of many small and large clusters
which are formed by the aggregation of white or black pixels
and even a pixel can also be considered a special cluster.
Each image block is a composition of different clusters in
a specific way. So we can control the change of the clusters
composition after flipping pixels to control the change of the
image texture structure indirectly.
The sum of weighted cluster areas is a measure of how
clusters form an image block. It can be represented as
∑
G= g(i) × g(i),
(4)
i∈I
where I is the set of all clusters with area larger than 1 in
the image block and g(i) denotes the area of the i-th cluster
which is the number of directly connected pixels with the
same value (as shown in Fig. 3). The first g(i) is equivalent
to the weight of the i-th cluster so that the larger the cluster
area is, the greater the weight will be set because larger clus-
ters have a greater influence on the image texture structure.
So we can calculate the change in the sum of weighted
cluster area after flipping each pixel, and finally choose the
pixel with the smallest change. It should be noted that to
ensure that all the stego blocks can be selected in the process
of extracting message, the dispersion degree of the image
block after flipping pixel needs to be maintained above the
threshold.
To sum up, our pixel flipping strategy is that, within the
dispersion threshold range, flipping the pixel where the
Fig. 3  An example of pixel flipping strategy on one block from
“Baboom” halftone image. The numbers in red are scores of changes
which are calculated by |G0 − Gi | in Eq. (5)
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Journal of Real-Time Image Processing (2019) 16:601–609
variation of cluster area after flipping changes is the small-
est. The formula is as follows:
y = arg mini |G0 − Gi |,
(5)
where G0 and Gi represent the sum of weighted cluster areas
of the cover block and the stego block flipping i-th pixel,
respectively.
3 Embedding and extraction procedure
In this section, the embedding and extraction procedure
of the proposed steganographic scheme is presented. The
proposed dispersion degree can filter out suitable blocks in
all blocks for message embedding. Then flipping the pixel
in the inconsistent block by minimizing the variation of
clusters area. The embedding and extraction procedures are
described in detail in the following two subsections.
3.1 Embedding procedure
For a given halftone image X, we first divide X into m × n
non-overlapped blocks. The length of message should be no
more than the total number of the cover image blocks. The
dispersion threshold is set automatically according to the
actual embedding capacity. The larger the embedding capac-
ity is, the larger the threshold will be set, and vice versa.
The embedding procedure contains following steps:
1. Divide halftone image X into non-overlapped blocks of
size m × n;
2. Calculate the dispersion degree for each block;
3. Set the dispersion threshold according to the embedded
capacity and the specific dispersion distribution of the
blocks;
4. Scan all blocks and select them whose dispersion degree
is above the threshold, then construct a specific block
sequence;
5. If the parity of the number of black pixels is inconsistent
with the corresponding message bit, flip the pixel which
minimizes the change of cluster area in block;
6. Repeat Step 5 until all message bits are embedded;
7. Successively replace each selected block in cover image
with the corresponding stego block and the stego image
is obtained.
3.2 Extraction procedure
In the extraction procedure, the dispersion threshold and the
block size are needed. Then the extraction of embedded mes-
sage is detailed as follows:
Journal of Real-Time Image Processing (2019) 16:601–609
1. Divide stego image Y into non-overlapped blocks of size
m × n;
2. Calculate the dispersion degree for each block and select
the blocks with dispersion degree above the same thresh-
old;
3. The message bit is ‘0’ if the parity of the number of
black pixels in the corresponding block is odd and ‘1’
otherwise.
4. Repeat Step 3 until all message bits are extracted.
4 Experiments and discussions
In this section, we first introduce database used in the experi-
ments, the parameters and scheme will be discussed later.
Then, we will display our experiment results to demonstrate
the effectiveness of the proposed method and make a com-
parison with the halftone steganographic schemes in [13,
15].
4.1 Experiment condition
The images we used in our experiments come from Boss-
Based-1.01 [1]. The size of these halftone images is resized
into 256 × 256 pixels. Then, we converted these images to
halftone images by error diffusion [12, 17]. Since some of
halftone images have lots of uniform blocks, we drop out
1000 halftone images with lots uniform blocks and we have
9000 halftone images.
To evaluate the proposed scheme, some experiments have
been conducted, including visual quality comparison and the
statistical security comparison. For the only two status in
halftone images, flipping pixels in unsuitable positions may
cause significant visual distortion. Unlike grayscale images
steganographic methods, the previous halftone stegano-
graphic methods focused more on the improvement of the
visual quality. “Pixel slave” strategy is a popular strategy
to improve visual quality after embedding messages. By
employing “pixel slave” strategy, the stego images gener-
ated by DHSPT and GIM have less cluster and salt and pep-
per noises. In the experiments, we first show the “Baboom”
halftone image to compare the subject visual quality.
To further evaluate the visual quality, some objective
visual quality assessments are employed in this section.
Even though objective distortion measures such as Mean
Squared Error (MSE), Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR),
and Structural Similarity Index Measure (SSIM) do not
match well with the evaluation for halftone images, [13]
can be used to define some objective distortion measures
for halftone images. Using the similar standard, we measure
the visual quality of our algorithms again in this paper. The
distortion resulting from the proposed algorithm is always
exhibited in the form of salt-and-pepper artifacts due to local
605
clusters of pixels. What is worth mentioning, people usually
tend to measure the amount and the size of the salt-and-
pepper clusters due to disturbing feature of larger clusters.
As in [13], the authors defined the following five scores:
∑
4
S1 = Ni , (6)
i=0
∑
4
S2 = (i + 1)Ni , (7)
i=0
S2
S3 = , (8)
S1
∑
4
S4 = Ni , (9)
i=2
∑
4
S5 = iNi = S2 − S1 , (10)
i=0
where Ni is the total number of the locations of the pixels
which are modified by steganography and the flipped pixels
having i neighbors with same pixel values in the 4-neighbor-
hood. The N0 corresponds to the number of visually pleasing
isolated elements in the locations of the flipped pixels. S1
gives the total number of two types of element that black
pixel in bright region (class 1) and white pixel in dark region
(class 4) in the locations of the flipped pixels. S2 gives the
total area covered by the clusters with class 1 and class 4 in
A. The bigger S2 is, the more clusters in class 1 and class 4
are in the halftone images. Previous works [13] demonstrate
that pixels in class 1 and class 4 causes remarkable “salt
and pepper” noise which degrades visual quality of half-
tone images. Therefore, the smaller S1 and S2 are, the better
visual quality of halftone image is. S3 gives the average area
per cluster. S3 means that a pixel is flipped in the region of
opposite brightness will generate S3 clusters which are black
in bright region or white in dark region and cause remark-
able black or white region. S4 is the number of elements of
A associated with clusters of size 3 or more, which is useful
because clusters of size 1 or 2 are not very visually disturb-
ing. S5 is a perceptual measure with a linear penalty model.
It gives a zero penalty score to isolated black or white pixels
which look visually pleasing.
In steganographic performance evaluation, the statisti-
cal security is another important criteria. Herein, some
experiments are conducted to evaluate the security of
our proposed steganographic scheme. RLCM-100D fea-
tures calculate the high-order difference images using
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606 Journal of Real-Time Image Processing (2019) 16:601–609

the run-length and co-occurrence matrices. The number
following each feature name is the dimension of corre-
sponded feature. We used these features and SVM with an
optimized Gaussian kernel to construct the steganalyzers.
The decision error rate PE is used to measure the decision
performance, which is defined as:
1
PE = (P + PFn ), (11)
2 Fp
where PFp and PFn stand for the probabilities of false positive
(detecting cover as stego) and false negative (detecting stego
as cover), respectively.
The experimental results are conducted with the help
of MATLAB R2016a. Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-7500 CPU
and speed 3.40GHZ and its capacity is 8GB of RAM.
4.2 Results and comparisons
As shown in Fig. 4, the visual quality of these stego images
is acceptable in vision. DHSPT (shown in Fig. 4b) and GIM
(shown in Fig. 4c) are embedded in all blocks, therefore the
flipped pixels are uniformly distributed in the whole images.
Using “pixel slave” strategy, the region around flipped pixels
has no remarkable clusters. The proposed methods (shown
in Fig. 4d), the embedding positions are mainly in the blocks
with complex texture. The stego image has no remarkable
noise, which demonstrates that the proposed methods can
maintain the visual quality.
The results of the objective visual quality comparison
can better evaluate the visual quality of the performance
of the halftone steganographic schemes. From Table 1, the
five scores of the proposed schemes are smaller than that
of DHSPT and GIM. As Fu and Au proposed in [13], the
smaller of the five scores means that good visual quality

Fig. 4  Image quality com-

parison on “Baboom” halftone
image of different stegano-
graphic methods. a The original
“Baboom” halftone image. b–d
are the stego images by embed-
ding 1024 bits by DHSPT [13],
GIM [15] and the proposed
method

13
Journal of Real-Time Image Processing (2019) 16:601–609 607

Table 1  Average scores (S1–S5) of various schemes on the halftone RLCM-100D mainly captures the lower order statistical
images dataset with 1024 bits embedded features while PMMTM-320D captures more structural fea-
S1 S2 S3 S4 S5 tures, the proposed scheme has better performance under
RLCM-320D. It is noted that in low payload, the advantage
Proposed 402 1209 3.04 295 807
of filtering out carriers is not obvious, because the flipped
DHSPT 792 2446 3.12 477 1654
pixels by all schemes are few and the changes of texture
GIM 695 2289 3.27 402 1594
structures are not obvious.
Generally, minimizing the changes of texture struc-
tures can reduce changes of co-occurrence and Pixel mesh
0.5 Markov transition matrix, so that the performance under
proposed scheme
0.45 DHSPT RLCM-100D and PMMTM-320D can be improved. GIM
0.4
GIM and DHSPT employ “pixel slave” strategy to flip pixels in
pairs rather than individually in each block, which inevitably
0.35
increase destructions between texture. To retain the depend-
0.3 ence between texture structures, the proposed scheme flips
one pixel by minimizing the change of the cluster composi-
E

0.25
P

0.2 tion in each block. Therefore, the proposed scheme achieves

high embedding capacity and acceptable anti-steganographic
0.15
security under the precondition of ensuring the visual quality
0.1
of stego image.
0.05

0 4.3 Complexity analysis
0 200 400 600 800 1000 1200
payload
(a) In this section, we analyze the time complexity of differ-
ent halftone steganographic schemes. For a given halftone
0.3
proposed scheme image X with NX pixels, critical message consisting of r
DHSPT bits needs to be embedded in it. In DHSPT [13], the master
GIM
pixels are set in advance by the random seed, so the execu-
tion time is mainly spent on selecting slave pixels. To select
0.2
the suitable slave pixel, the connection weights of neighbor
pixels need to be calculated in a 3 × 3 neighborhood, which
E

only consumes constant time. Therefore, the time complex-

P

ity of DHSPT is O(r).

0.1 In GIM [15], the halftone image is first divided into m × n
non-overlapped blocks. For each block, the time complex-
ity of data embedding is O(r × m × n). The image has m×n
NX

blocks, so the total time complexity is O(r × NX ).

0
0 200 400 600 800 1000 1200
In the proposed steganography scheme, the embedding
payload procedure mainly includes selecting blocks and flipping
(b) pixels. First, the halftone image also needs to be divided
into m × n non-overlapped blocks. To calculate the disper-
Fig. 5  Statistical security comparison of different halftone steg-
sion degree for each block, the time complexity required
is m×n so the total time complexity is O(NX ) for the image.
NX
anographic schemes. The steganalyzers are a RLCM [18] and b
PMMTM [7] For each suitable block, we need to flip the pixel with the
smallest variation of the cluster area after being flipped with
O(r × (m × n)2 ). Therefore, the total time complexity of our
for halftone images. The results can further demonstrate the scheme is O(NX + r × (m × n)2 ), which is better than GIM
proposed scheme has good visual imperceptibility. [15].
In addition, Fig. 5 shows the statistical security com- In the experiment, we recorded the average execution
parison of different halftone steganographic schemes. It time consumed by the embedding procedures of different
can be seen that regardless of whether the steganalyzer is halftone images in the dataset. The proposed steganogra-
RLCM-100D [18] or PMMTM-320D [7], the proposed phy scheme has the excellent performance and the average
steganographic scheme has the best performance. Since execution time is 0.713s when embedding 512 bits, which

13
608
is significantly short, because our scheme can be efficiently
realized through the operation of lower time complexity,
mainly involving the operation of filtrating blocks and
selecting flipped pixels, which only needs to calculate the
dispersion degree of each block and the variation of the clus-
ter area after each candidate pixel is flipped, respectively.
Therefore, the proposed steganography scheme can be effi-
ciently applied in real-time image processing.
5 Conclusions
In this paper, we have proposed an efficient halftone image
steganographic scheme based on optimal dispersion degree.
By employing the proposed concept of dispersion degree,
we can quantify the region texture complexity. Thus 1the
regions with large dispersion degree can be selected as car-
riers since embedding messages in complex texture regions
are visually imperceptible. The secrete messages are embed-
ded by minimizing the changes of texture structure. Experi-
ments show that the visual quality of the proposed scheme
is better than existing schemes and the statistical security is
acceptable. For practicability, the proposed scheme can hide
information with very low processing time.
For halftone steganography, the visual quality and the
statistical security have a closer relationship with each other.
They are two in one and they can help each other forward.
Herein, in the future works, we may focus more on the tex-
ture correlation to design a more secure steganographic
method with good visual quality.
Acknowledgements This work is supported by the National Natu-
ral Science Foundation of China (No. U1736118), the National Key
R&D Program of China (No. 2017YFB0802500), the Natural Sci-
ence Foundation of Guangdong (No. 2016A030313350), the Special
Funds for Science and Technology Development of Guangdong (No.
2016KZ010103), the Key Project of Scientific Research Plan of Guang-
zhou (No. 201804020068), the Fundamental Research Funds for the
Central Universities (No. 16lgjc83 and No. 17lgjc45).
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Yingjie Xue received the B.S. degree in School of Mathematics and
Statistics from Central South University, China in 2016. He is currently
a Master’s student with School of Electronics and Information Tech-
nology, Sun Yat-sen University, China. His research interests include
multimedia security and multimedia signal processing.
Wanteng Liu received the B.S. degree in School of Data and Computer
Science, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, China in 2018. He is cur-
rently a Master student in School of Data and Computer Science, Sun
Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, China. His research interests include
multimedia security and multimedia signal processing.
Wei Lu received the B.S. degree in Automation from Northeast Univer-
sity, China in 2002, the M.S. degree and the Ph.D. degree in Computer
Science from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China in 2005 and 2007,
respectively. He is currently an Associate Professor with the School
of Data and Computer Science, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou,
China. His research interests include multimedia forensics and security,
multimedia signal processing, image/video intelligent analysis.
609
Yuileong Yeung received the B.S. degree in Optical Information Sci-
ence and Technology from Sun Yat-sen University, China, in 2016. He
is currently a Master’s student with the School of Data and Computer
Science, Sun Yat-sen University, China. His research interests include
multimedia security and multimedia signal processing.
Xianjin Liu received the B.S. degree from Hainan University, China in
2015. He is currently a Master’s student with the School of Data and
Computer Science, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, China. His
research interests include multimedia security and multimedia signal
processing.
Hongmei Liu received the M.S. degree in Computer Science from Tsin-
ghua University, China, and the Ph.D. degree in Radiophysics from
Sun Yat-sen University, China, in 1996 and 2001, respectively. From
November 2002 to December 2003, she was a postdoctoral fellow at
ENIC, Lille 1, France. She is now an Associate Professor with the
School of Data and Computer Science, Sun Yat-sen University, Guang-
zhou, China. Her current research interests include information hiding,
image/video watermarking, and video compression.
13