Performance analysis of nonuniform quantization-based data hiding

In this paper, we tackle the problem of performance improvement of quantization-based data-hiding in the middle-watermark-to-noise ratio (WNR) regime. The objective is to define the quantization-based framework that maximizes the performance of the known-host-state data-hiding in the middle-WNR taking into account the host probability density function (pdf). The experimental results show that the usage of uniform deadzone quantization (UDQ) permits to achieve higher performance than using uniform quantization (UQ) or spread spectrum (SS)-based data-hiding. The performance enhancement is demonstrated for both achievable rate and error probability criteria.