Toward a Unified Performance Metric for Benchmarking Steganography Systems

Abstract

Recent advances in network speeds for exchanging multimedia data over insecure networks has resulted in an increased interest in steganography techniques. These techniques are usually evaluated based on their performance in three attributes; namely, capacity, imperceptibility, and robustness. Each of these attributes has its own measurement metric. Hence, comparing two different steganography schemes based on these individual metric tools becomes inconsistent. In this paper, a novel measurement metric tool is introduced for benchmarking steganography schemes. This new tool, named the “Combined Capacity-Quality-Robustness Effectiveness” (CCQRE) metric, combines the three opposing attributes of a steganography system into one conglomerate performance measure. Comparative results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed CCQRE metric for benchmarking various steganography schemes based on the researcher’s interest in capacity, imperceptibility, or robustness.