Fractional-Order Spatial Steganography and Blind Steganalysis for Printed Matter: Anti-Counterfeiting for Product External Packing in Internet-of-Things

Abstract

This paper advocates a novel conceptual formulation of the fractional-order spatial steganography (FSS) and blind steganalysis for printed matter, which can be efficiently employed in the anti-counterfeiting for product external packing in Internet-of-Things (IoT). Traditional digital steganography is not printable. Within the limits of our knowledge, until now, there are not a well-established steganography and a corresponding steganalysis for printed matter in IoT, which should receive desired attention. Fractional calculus has potentially received prominence in applications in the domain of image processing mainly because of its strengths like long-term memory, nonlocality, and weak singularity. Therefore, in an attempt to overcome the aforementioned technical limitation of traditional digital steganography, this paper has studied here, as an interesting theoretical problem, would it be possible to apply the capability of preserving the edges and textural details of fractional calculus to the achievement of the steganography and steganalysis for printed matter in IoT. Motivated by this inspiration, in this work, this paper introduces a novel conceptual formulation of an FSS and a fractional-order blind steganalysis (FBS) for printed matter. At first, according to the opponent process theory of color vision, to better achieve the imperceptibility of the hidden secret information, this paper uses both the self-similar complex textures in a neighborhood and the opponent channel of blue versus yellow to implement FSS for printed matter. Second, without requiring a priori knowledge regarding the characteristics of the original carrier image, hidden secret image, and steganography, an FBS, a fractional-order multimodal function optimization algorithm, is proposed. Finally, the efficient capability of hiding secret information of FSS and that of detecting secret information of FBS are analyzed in detail experimentally, respectively. These two important advantages lead to the superiority of the proposed approach for defending against statistics attack, rotation and distortion attack, cropping attack, scaling attack, noise attack, and color copy attack. The main contribution of this paper is the first preliminary attempt of a feasible achievement of a spatial steganography and a blind steganalysis for printed matter.