StegoNote: Steganography in Guitar Music Using Note Modulation

Hui Tian ； Zhaohua Zhu ； Chin-Chen Chang ； Yongfeng Huang ； Tian Wang ； Yonghong Chen ； Yiqiao Cai

《International Journal of Network Security》 22卷1期 (2020/01) Pp. 68-79

https://doi.org/10.6633/IJNS.202001_22(1).07

摘要

Due to its diversity, sensual and physical redundancies, music is considered as a type of ideal carrier for steganography, and has attracted increasing attention from the research community of information hiding. In this paper, we present a novel note-modulating steganographic scheme for guitar music. Differing from the existing works, the proposed scheme conceals secret messages into guitar accompaniments based on the fact that there are many note combinations available for expressing a group of similar harmony effects. Specifically, the proposed scheme first determines the available tones for information hiding, and then embeds the secret messages by modulating the note combination of each candidate tone with matrix embedding strategies. The embedding process has no appreciable impact on the playing effect of the music, because only a small part of the musical tones in an accompaniment are substituted by the other note combinations that can achieve similar harmony effects. The proposed scheme is further evaluated with thirty guitar-music samples collected from the Internet. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed scheme is feasible and efficient. Particularly, employing an appropriate matrix embedding strategy, the proposed scheme can achieve a good balance between steganographic transparency and capacity.

關鍵字

Guitar Music ； Information Hiding ； Music Steganography ； Note Modulation