Adaptive Electrocardiogram Steganography Based on 2D Approach with Predetermined Rules

Abstract

Based on two-dimensional (2D) bit-embedding/-extraction approach, we propose a simple data hiding for electrocardiogram (ECG) signal. The patient’s sensitive (diagnostic) data can be efficiently hidden into 2D ECG host via the proposed decision rules. The performance of the proposed method using various sizes of the host bundles was demonstrated. Simulations have confirmed that the average SNR of the proposed method with a host bundle of size 3 ´ 3 is superior to that of existing techniques, while our payload is competitive to theirs. In addition, our method with a host bundle of size 2 ´  2 generated the best SNR values, while that with a host bundle of size 4 ´  4 provided the largest payload among the compared methods. Moreover, the proposed method provides robustness performance better than existing ECG steganography. Namely, our method provides high hiding capacity and robust against the attacks such as cropping, inversion, scaling, translation, truncation, and Gaussian noise-addition attacks. Since the proposed method is simple, it can be employed in real-time applications such as portable biometric devices.