3D Multilayered Turtle Shell Models for Image Steganography

Abstract

By embedding secret data into cover images, image steganography can produce non-discriminable stego-images. The turtle shell model for data hiding is an excellent method that uses a reference matrix to make a good balance between image quality and embedding capacity. However, increasing the embedding capacity by extending the area of basic structures of the turtle shell model usually leads to severe degradation of image quality. In this research, we innovatively extend the basic structure of the turtle shell model into a three-dimensional (3D) space. Some intrinsic properties of the original turtle shell model are well preserved in the 3D version. Theoretic analysis shows that the new proposed models have good performance both in the image quality and in the complexity of the reference matrix. Our experimental results justify the theoretic conclusions.