An image distortion-based enhanced embedding scheme

Abstract

Many clandestine applications send their secret information, e.g., investigation reports, to a destination by implanting them into an image document, like forensic evidence. In that case, both the document and the implanted information are secret and equally important. To protect the document's information, called the cover information, from being disclosed, many reversible data embedding (RDE) schemes first destroy the cover information intentionally and then embed secrets into these destroyed contents. A reversible process in the receiver end retrieves both the implanted secrets and the cover information. The existing schemes suffer from less embedding capacity, i.e., embedded bits per pixel (bpp), because their reversible processes either are unable to implant bit(s) into every pixel or implant a chunk of message bits into a group of pixels where the length of the message bits is smaller than the number of pixels in the group. The article proposes a novel distortion-based RDE scheme that achieves an embedding capacity of 2 n bpp, where 0 ≤ n ≤ 3. The proposed scheme destroys the information in the image before and after the data implantation task to strongly obliterate both the cover information and the embedded bits. During implementing this proposed process, the scheme establishes seven levels of encapsulated securities and, thus, strengthens the security of the scheme. The maximum embedding capacity and the lowest level of image distortion that are achieved by the proposed scheme are 8 bpp and 5 dB, respectively. These two values significantly dominate the same figures that are achieved in its competing schemes.

A Block Mean Insertion and Dual Stego Generation Based Embedding Strategy

“…In the reversible data hiding arena, seven levels of security features are a new invention. Kamal et al's used seven levels of security in an encapsulation way [20].…”