Adaptive Electrocardiogram Steganography Based on 2D Approach with Predetermined Rules

Abstract

<jats:p>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.</jats:p>

An Improved ECG Steganography Using Integer Wavelet Transform and Offset Coefficient with LSB Substitution

“…In addition, the second version of the proposed method (represented as LSB) provided the best SNR performance in the payload between 15 Kb and 22 Kb among the various techniques. The other three methods [15,18,19] provided similar SNR values when the payload size is less than 15 Kb. The second version of the proposed method embedded only three data bits in the last row of a host block.…”

“…To evaluate hiding performance, several objective assessments such as SNR, PSNR, MAE, and PRD have been commonly used in ECG steganography [13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20]. Simulations have indicated that the less value of , the lower the MAE, the larger the SNR/PSNR, implying that a good perceived quality can be obtained by the proposed method, and vice versa.…”

“…Recently, several research works have developed data hiding methods [9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19] for the protection (or privacy) of sensitive information in ECG signals. ´Swierkosz and Augustyniak [9] proposed an ECG watermarking scheme based on the discrete wavelet transform (DWT) domain.…”

“…Based on a 2D bit-embedding and bit-extraction approach, Yang et al [18] proposed an effective ECG steganography, where a patient's data can be hidden into the host blocks of an ECG. The performance of the method was demonstrated with host blocks in various sizes.…”

Employment of Enhanced Coefficient Adjustment Technique and Module-based Substitution to Hide Secret Message in ECG Signal

“…Additionally, by reducing the payload size to 2.4 Kbytes, the method was able to achieve a PSNR of approximately 70 dB. Yang et al [12] introduced a 2D approach for ECG steganography. In this method, the input ECG data is converted into blocks of size n × n before the embedding process.…”