Techniques disclosed herein provide an approach using pixel perturbation to transmit information. In one embodiment, a pixel perturbation engine perturbs pixels of an image to encode meta-information therein. In particular, the perturbation engine may perform controlled perturbation of pixel bits which are unlikely to affect visual quality are perturbed, such as perturbing the least significant bits in one or more channels of a RGB or YUV image. Higher order bits may also be perturbed in color channels such as the blue or UV channels that the human eye is less sensitive to. To mitigate loss of information, the information may be encoded using error correcting codes. After the image having meta-information encoded therein is transmitted to a client device, the meta-information may be recovered and used to determine performance of the virtual desktop infrastructures (VDI) system.