Reversible Steganography Research Articles

Reversible Data Hiding under Inconsistent Distortion Metrics.

Recursive code construction (RCC), based on the optimal transition probability matrix (OTPM), approaching the rate-distortion bound of reversible data hiding (RDH) has been proposed. Using the existing methods, OTPM can be effectively estimated only for a consistent distortion metric, i.e., if the host elements at different positions share the same distortion metric. However, in many applications, the distortion metrics are position dependent and should thus be inconsistent. Inconsistent distortion metrics can usually be quantified as a multi-distortion metric. In this paper, we first formulate the rate-distortion problem of RDH under a multi-distortion metric and subsequently propose a general framework to estimate the corresponding OTPM, with which RCC is extended to approach the rate-distortion bound of RDH under the multi-distortion metric. We apply the proposed framework to two examples of inconsistent distortion metrics: RDH in color image and reversible steganography. The experimental results show that the proposed method can efficiently improve upon the existing techniques.

Effective reversible image steganography based on rhombus prediction and local complexity

Reversible image steganography attracts much attention of researchers since such technique has ability to reconstruct the original version of the host image losslessly after image steganography. In this paper, we propose a new reversible image steganography based on rhombus prediction and local complexity. To maintain good quality of stego images and to achieve high accuracy of tamper detection, the local complexity of each pixel is first evaluated, then, the prediction error is calculated by using rhombus prediction for embedding the authentication code. Experimental results demonstrated that the proposed scheme has ability to recover the original version of the host images. In addition, the proposed scheme obtains better performance than previous schemes in terms of tamper detection and image quality.

Preserving privacy of online digital physiological signals using blind and reversible steganography

Background and objectivePhysiological signals such as electrocardiograms (ECG) and electromyograms (EMG) are widely used to diagnose diseases. Presently, the Internet offers numerous cloud storage services which enable digital physiological signals to be uploaded for convenient access and use. Numerous online databases of medical signals have been built. The data in them must be processed in a manner that preserves patients’ confidentiality. MethodsA reversible error-correcting-coding strategy will be adopted to transform digital physiological signals into a new bit-stream that uses a matrix in which is embedded the Hamming code to pass secret messages or private information. The shared keys are the matrix and the version of the Hamming code. ResultsAn online open database, the MIT-BIH arrhythmia database, was used to test the proposed algorithms. The time-complexity, capacity and robustness are evaluated. Comparisons of several evaluations subject to related work are also proposed. ConclusionsThis work proposes a reversible, low-payload steganographic scheme for preserving the privacy of physiological signals. An (n, m)-hamming code is used to insert (n − m) secret bits into n bits of a cover signal. The number of embedded bits per modification is higher than in comparable methods, and the computational power is efficient and the scheme is secure. Unlike other Hamming-code based schemes, the proposed scheme is both reversible and blind.

Raw reversibility of information hiding on the basis of VQ systems

Up to now, the VQ-based steganographic methods are all lossy approaches since they cannot recover the cover images. Prior studies on reversibility in VQ-based steganography only show the ability to recover the quantized cover images. This paper presents a new two-phase steganographic protocol of genuine VQ-based reversibility, referring to the ability of using a VQ codebook to recover a target cover image and to retrieve all hidden data from the stego-images. The protocol consists of two phases. The Phase 1 generates a stego-image of excellent visual quality; the Phase 2 provides high visual quality and high embedding capacity of the stego-image. Both the stego-images used in the two phases can pass Chi-square test. To evaluate the performance of our method, we have conducted several experiments and compared Phase 1 and Phase 2 of the proposed protocol with two prior studies in reversible steganography based on VQ. The results show that Phase 2 achieves significant improvement on both the embedding capacity and the visual quality of the stego-images. On the other hand, Phase 1 achieves the best visual quality and the lowest embedding capacity of the stego-images. Together with the two phases of the proposed protocol, we can achieve genuine recovery of the cover image of Phase 1. This property cannot be achieved by any combination of prior studies since they all provide low embedding capacity of the stego-images and high difference between the cover image and the stego-image.

Reversible Video Steganography using Hybrid DWT- DCT with Secure Cryptographic Technique and GPU

Objectives: To propose a system that allows hiding of a video as secret message under the cover medium for secured transfer. Methods/Statistical analysis: In early days most of the work is done to hide multimedia data such as text, images, audio by using Least Significant Bit (LSB) and Most Significant Bit (MSB) techniques. Use of LSB and MSB techniques for data hiding affects the quality of the cover medium also it allow to hide limited amount of data. Findings: Exchange of large amount of secret data is not possible when multimedia data is used as a secret message. So video steganography is used, which allows to hide large amount of secret data and to transfer it securely. Proposed system allows hiding video as secret message under the cover medium. This is used for hiding and transmitting significantly more amount of data securely as compared to that of the existing systems. In the proposed work, hybrid DWT-DCT is applied on each frame of both cover video stream and secret video stream. For embedding, SVD (Singular Value Decomposition) is applied on LL band of each frame. For reducing the execution time the proposed model is implemented using GPU (Graphics Processing Unit). From results of proposed system 2.09 MB video can be hidden under the 2.27MB video which shows quite high capacity for hiding than any other video steganographic existing system. Also the quality of video does not get affected even after embedding the secret video. Improvements: Further work can be done to enhance the image quality of retrieved secret video.

Reversible steganography in image : an overview and review

Reversible steganography in image : an overview and review

High capacity reversible steganography in encrypted images based on feature mining in plaintext domain

A reversible steganographic scheme in encrypted images with high capacity based on feature mining in plaintext domain is proposed in this paper. Two techniques are used: multi-granularity encryption and residual histogram shifting. Firstly, a cover image is encrypted both on fine-grained level and coarse-grained level with content-owner key. Then, the additional data can be embedded into the encrypted image by exploring both the similarity of neighbouring pixels in local level and residual histogram in global level with data-hiding key. For legal receivers, image decryption and data extraction can be free to choose. If content-owner key and data-hiding key are both adopted at the same time, the cover image can be restored error-free along with data extraction. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme significantly outperforms the previous approaches both in terms of embedding quality and embedding capacity.

A Reversible Steganography Scheme of Secret Image Sharing Based on Cellular Automata and Least Significant Bits Construction

Secret image sharing schemes have been extensively studied by far. However, there are just a few schemes that can restore both the secret image and the cover image losslessly. These schemes have one or more defects in the following aspects: (1) high computation cost; (2) overflow issue existing when modulus operation is used to restore the cover image and the secret image; (3) part of the cover image being severely modified and the stego images having worse visual quality. In this paper, we combine the methods of least significant bits construction (LSBC) and dynamic embedding with one-dimensional cellular automata to propose a new lossless scheme which solves the above issues and can resist differential attack and support parallel computing. Experimental results also show that this scheme has the merit of big embedding capacity.

A Reversible Steganography Suitable for Embedding Small Amounts of Data

A reversible information hiding scheme that is suitable for embedding small amounts of data is proposed in this paper. The secret data are transformed to base-k data stream, and each number is embedded into a pixel pair if the pixels' difference is within a certain range. Referring a pre-determined table, the gray values of the pixel pair are modified so as to carry the secret number. In order to distinguish the secret-carry pairs from no-secret-carry pairs, the differences of the pixel pairs without secret data embedded are expanded by modification of the difference histogram. The proposed information hiding scheme has flexible embedding capacity and low overhead. The peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) is greater than those of existing methods that are based on histogram modification when the embedding capacity is low. Experimental results showed that the proposed scheme provides good embedding performances for small amounts of embedded data.

Reversible Steganography on OFDM Channel: A Role of Cyclic Codes

Reversible Steganography on OFDM Channel: A Role of Cyclic Codes

Reversible Steganography on OFDM Channel-A Role of RS Coding

Reversible Steganography on OFDM Channel-A Role of RS Coding

A user-friendly secret image sharing scheme with reversible steganography based on cellular automata

Secret image sharing is a mechanism to protect a secret image among a group of participants by encrypting the secret into shares and decrypting the secret with sufficient shares. Conventional schemes generate meaningless shares, which are hard to identify and lead to suspicion of secret image encryption. To overcome these problems, sharing schemes with steganography were presented. The meaningless shared data were embedded into the cover image to form stego images. However, distorted stego images cannot be reverted to original. In this work, a novel secret image sharing scheme with reversible steganography is proposed. Main contribution of this work is that two-dimensional reversible cellular automata with memory is utilized to encrypt a secret image into shared data, which are then embedded into cover image for forming stego images. By collecting sufficient stego images, not only the secret image is lossless reconstructed, but also distorted stego image is reverted to original. Simulation results shows that low computation cost and pleasing stego image quality are also achieved by the proposed scheme.

Reversible Data Hiding Using Two Marked Images Based on Adaptive Coefficient-Shifting Algorithm

This paper proposes a novel form of reversible data hiding using two marked images by employing the adaptive coefficient-shifting (ACS) algorithm. The proposed ACS algorithm consists of three parts: the minimum-preserved scheme, the minimum-preserved with squeezing scheme, and the base-value embedding scheme. More specifically, each input block of a host image can be encoded to two stego-blocks according to three predetermined rules by the above three schemes. Simulations validate that the proposed method not only completely recovers the host medium but also losslessly extracts the hidden message. The proposed method can handle various kinds of images without any occurrence of overflow/underflow. Moreover, the payload and peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) performance of the proposed method is superior to that of the conventional invertible data hiding schemes. Furthermore, the number of shadows required by the proposed method is less than that required by the approaches which are based upon secret image sharing with reversible steganography.

Secret image sharing with reversible capabilities

Secret image sharing is a technique to share a secret image among n participants using Shamir's secret sharing scheme. Secret image is revealed if any k of the n shares is processed according to the scheme. Research reported in the literature is focused on improving known issues of the method. Reconstruction without distortion, reducing the size expansion of the share images, improving stego image quality and enhancing authentication ability of the method are some of the issues. Recovering cover images after the revealing procedure is an important issue. In 2009, Wu et al. proposed a technique based on reversible steganography to solve this problem. A location map is used to recover cover images, which needs extra information. The proposed method outlined in this paper does not need any information except shares to recover cover images. In addition, visual quality of the shares or the peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR) values of stego images are improved which is used to demonstrate the effectiveness of the method. Experimental results indicate a 3 dB PSNR improvement on the average compared to Wu et al.'s method.

Reversible steganography based on side match and hit pattern for VQ-compressed images

Data hiding is an important technique in multimedia security. Multimedia data hiding techniques enable message senders to disguise secret data by embedding them into cover media. Thus, delivering secret messages is as easy as sending the cover media. Recently, many researchers have studied reversible data hiding for images. Those methods can reconstruct the original cover image and extract the embedded secret data from a stego-image. This study proposes a novel reversible steganographic method of embedding secret data into a vector quantization (VQ) compressed image by applying the concept of side match. The proposed method uses extra information, namely the hit pattern, to achieve reversibility. Moreover, its small hit pattern enables the embedding of the entire hit pattern along with the secret data in most cases. To optimize visual quality of the output stego-image, the method applies the concept of partitioned codebooks (state codebooks). The partition operation on the codebook uses a look-up table to minimize embedding and extraction time. We also propose the use of diagonal seed blocks to embed the entire hit pattern into the cover image without producing any extra control messages. Compared to the Chang and Lin method, the experimental results show that the proposed method has higher capacity, better visual quality, and shorter execution time.

Reversible Steganography for BTC-compressed Images

Reversible steganography becomes a popular hiding problem in recent years. A reversible steganographicmethod can reconstruct an original image without loss from the stego-image after extracting the embedded data. Unlike traditional reversible methods in which data is hidden in uncompressed images, we propose a reversible scheme for BTC (block truncation coding)-compressed images. The secret data embedded in the compressed image are more difficult to detect than in the uncompressed image. To achieve reversibility, the properties of side matching and BTC-compressed code are applied. The experimental results show that the proposed method is feasible for BTC-compressed images and can embed one more bit in each BTC-encoded block.

An improved reversible steganography scheme based on dual cover images

Due to recent developments in internet technologies secret message communication is conducted electronically which created new needs, issues, and opportunities. In secret message communication, we prefer that only the intended recipient has the ability to receive the contents of the communication. A common solution to this problem is the usage of steganography which hides secret messages in cover images and only the intended recipient receives the contents of the image. In this paper, we have proposed an improved reversible data hiding scheme for grey-scale images using dual steganography images. This scheme provides high security as the secret image can not be extracted without the knowledge of two steganoimages. Experimental results demonstrate that the scheme provides a higher embedding capacity without making noticeable distortion in the steganoimage.

Reversible hiding in DCT-based compressed images

This paper presents a lossless and reversible steganography scheme for hiding secret data in each block of quantized discrete cosine transformation (DCT) coefficients in JPEG images. In this scheme, the two successive zero coefficients of the medium-frequency components in each block are used to hide the secret data. Furthermore, the scheme modifies the quantization table to maintain the quality of the stego-image. Experimental results also confirm that the proposed scheme can provide expected acceptable image quality of stego-images and successfully achieve reversibility.

Reversible Steganography for VQ-Compressed Images Using Side Matching and Relocation

The reversible steganographic method allows an original image to be completely reconstructed from the stegoimage after the extraction of the embedded data. The traditional reversible embedding schemes are not suitable for images compressed using vector quantization (VQ) and usually require the use of the location map for reversibility. In this paper, we propose a reversible embedding scheme for VQ-compressed images that is based on side matching and relocation. The new method achieves reversibility without using the location map. The experimental results show that the proposed method is practical for VQ-compressed images and provides high image quality and embedding capacity

Reversible steganographic method using SMVQ approach based on declustering

Reversible steganography allows an original image to be completely restored after the extraction of hidden data embedded in a cover image. In this paper, we propose a reversible scheme for VQ-compressed images that is based on a declustering strategy and takes advantage of the local spatial characteristics of the image. The main advantages of our method are ease of implementation, low computational demands, and no requirement for auxiliary data. The experimental results show that the embedding capacity of the proposed method is controlled by the number of declustered groups and the spatial characteristics of the cover image. The results also show that the proposed method has the best embedding capacity and the least running time compared with other methods.