Steganography in animated emoji using self-reference

Animated emoji is a kind of GIF image, which is widely used in online social networks (OSN) for its efficiency in transmitting vivid and personalized information. Aiming at realizing covert communication in animated emoji, this paper proposes an improved steganography framework in animated emoji. We propose a self-reference algorithm to improve the steganography security. Meanwhile, the relations between adjacent frames of the cover GIF image are considered to further improve the distortion function. After that we embed the secret message into the GIF image using the popular framework of Syndrome Trellis Coding (STC). Experimental results show that the proposed method can provide better security performances than state-of-the-art works.