A Novel Coverless Information Hiding Method Based on the Most Significant Bit of the Cover Image

Abstract

With the rapid development of information technology recently, information security has become the focus of public concern. Information Hiding (IH) technology is an effective method to tackle the problem of information leakage incidents. In this paper, a novel coverless information hiding method based on the Most Significant Bit (MSB) of cover image is proposed (CIHMSB). Firstly, the cover image is segmented into a number of fragments. Secondly, in order to use the MSB of cover image to represent the secret information, the average intensity of each fragment is calculated. Thirdly, a one-to-one mapping between the MSB of the image fragment and the secret information is established using the mapping sequence (denote as $Km$ ), decided by the sender and the receiver in advance. This process produces a mapping flag (denote as $Kf$ ), which is sent by the sender along with the stego image. The objective of the proposed work is to increase hiding capacity, curtail the distortion of the stego image to improve its quality and reduce the Bit Error Rate ( $BER$ ) of stego image in the case of distortion. Experimental results show that the proposed method can conceal 2601 bits secret information per carrier with peak signal-to-noise ratio ( $PSNR$ ) of $\infty $ dB. What’s more, some stego image quality assessment parameters, such as structural similarity ( $SSIM$ ) index and universal image quality index ( $Qi$ ), are slightly better than existing information hiding methods. Furthermore, the proposed method has good performance against such as AGWN, salt & pepper noise, low-pass filtering and JPEG compression attacks.