Data Hiding Scheme Based on Quad General Difference Expansion Cluster

Abstract

For some periods, information technology has developed, but there are some issues with its data security. For this reason, exploring the data hiding method is relevant, which is an appropriate study in the information concealment paradigm. Several factors must be considered in its implementation, such as the capacity of the confidential data and the quality of the generated stego file. Nevertheless, it is difficult to solve those two problems simultaneously in actual application. We often need to choose either one of them, which is more suitable for a specific environment. In this research, those problems are approached by extending the Quad General Difference Expansion Cluster (QGDEC) method combined with fuzzy logic in the image environment. We use the cluster in the QGDEC, which aims to ensure that the pixel difference is not significant so that the quality of the stego can be maintained. The confidential data can be embedded in multiple layers based on several image characteristics, which can be processed using fuzzy logic. The result of the experiment denotes that the proposed method obtains about 20 dB higher than that of the previous ones regarding the Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR) for the same capacity of the secret. It depicts that the proposed method is more applicable than the previous ones by considering the specific message size and its respective characteristics.