Reversible DNA Information Hiding based on Circular Histogram Shifting

Abstract

DNA computing technology makes the interests on DNA storage and DNA watermarking / steganography that use the DNA information as a newly medium. DNA watermarking that embeds the external watermark into DNA information without the biological mutation needs the reversibility for the perfect recovery of host DNA, the continuous embedding and detecting processing, and the mutation analysis by the watermark. In this paper, we propose a reversible DNA watermarking based on circular histogram shifting of DNA code values with the prevention of false start codon, the preservation of DNA sequence length, and the high watermark capacity, and the blind detection. Our method has the following features. The first is to encode nucleotide bases of 4-character variable to integer code values by code order. It makes the signal processing of DNA sequence easy. The second is to embed the multiple bits of watermark into -order coded value by using circular histogram shifting. The third is to check the possibility of false start codon in the inter or intra code values. Experimental results verified the our method has higher watermark capacity 0.11~0.50 bpn than conventional methods and also the false start codon has not happened in our method.