Abstract
Image steganography is a multipurpose-serving key emerging technology that is used for covertly transferring, storing, and governing various digital data, including intellectual properties and copyrights, social media data, multimedia data, and secrets of law-enforcing agencies. During the management in the stated information, nowadays, massive amounts of data are handled that require greater security. For that purpose, data are embedded into a cover image to hide them from any intruders. Nevertheless, the requirements of a larger embedding capacity, improved stego-image quality, and reduced time complexity is increasing. In this paper, the authors have presented a novel data-embedding scheme where the prediction error-based data-hiding scheme is modified in an intricate way so that all the image pixels can accept secret bits. A distance matrix between the pixel values of each image block and a reference value are measured first. Thereafter, the distances are encoded into two states: 1 and −1. That encoding process enables the scheme to implant one bit in every pixel of the cover image. During the bit implantation, the errors 1 and −1 are modified by shifting them to the right and left directions, respectively. This strategy enhances the embedding capacity by a factor of more than 2. The use of reference values reduces the computational complexity notably, and in the meanwhile increases the security and robustness of the scheme because the reference values are not open to any third party. The scheme also reduces the time complexity by 2–16 times with compared to its competing schemes. Experimental results prove the superiority of the proposed algorithm on embedding capacity, visual quality, and time complexity compared to the current well-accepted existing schemes.
Highlights
Steganography is the art of hiding information within other media, known as “cover media”.The objective of steganography is to conceal secret data into the contents of the “cover media” in a manner that renders the probability of unintended users finding this secret data extremely low [1].This way of securing information in communication technology differentiates itself from the well-known encryption method because in the encrypted information one can presume the existence of the secret data and try guessing key(s) or a portion of message to decipher the secrets [2]
Considering these encoded errors are similar to the prediction errors, we relate that process with the prediction error‐based scheme
The processing complexity is compared by the number of arithmetic and logical operators that are are needed to be executed by that algorithm
Summary
Steganography is the art of hiding information within other media, known as “cover media”. The same authors, in [20,24], have improved the embedding capacity by employing prediction errors for shifting a block of pixels from one gray part to another These works are devoted to improving the embedding capacity in the research area of the image distortion-based scheme, where a stego image is distorted to a level so that the cover contents are not sensible. In the area of quality preservation-based embedment processes, the application of the difference of an adjacent pixel (as is observed in [6]) and the embedding rules of [13,21,22,23] will improve both the embedding rate, the stego-image quality, as well as the security.
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