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A high-capacity performance-preserving blind technique for reversible information hiding via MIDI files using delta times

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Abstract

A new high-capacity information hiding method for embedding secret messages into MIDI files is proposed. The method can preserve the original musical performance of the cover MIDI file. The property of the variable-length quantity, which expresses the magnitude of the delta time before every event in a MIDI file, is utilized for secret bit embedding. The embedding is accomplished by padding the delta times with different numbers of leading constant bytes of 8016 to represent the secret bits. The method is both reversible and blind because the original cover MIDI file can be restored completely from the stego-MIDI file by extracting the embedded data out from the resulting stego-MIDI file without referencing the original cover MIDI file. A capability of hiding a large amount of secret information is achieved since the delta time is a basic parameter that appears before every event in the MIDI file. Good experimental results yielded by the proposed method as well as a comparison of the method with five existing performance-preserving methods from the viewpoints of stego-file quality, payload capacity, and data security show the superiority and feasibility of the proposed method.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Science Council, Taiwan under Project No. NSC 100-2221-E-327-029. The basic idea of the proposed method in this paper has been published previously in Liu and Wu [19] as a 6-page short paper (in Chinese), which includes limited technical details and few experimental results using only sixteen MIDI files selected from a data set called VEMUS [28] as the tested files. In this paper, a great deal of improvement has been made, including: (1) enlarging the survey of related studies and adding more references; (2) elaborating the detailed steps of the data embedding algorithm (Algorithm 1); (3) including additionally a data extraction algorithm (Algorithm 2) which is described in detail; (4) using 452 MIDI files which are the whole set of the VEMUS database plus six files collected from the Internet (instead of just the 16 files used in [19] which are only 4% of the 458 files used here) as the tested data in the experiments; (5) providing more experimental results and analyses of them by graphs or diagrams; (6) comparing the results of the proposed method with those of five existing methods; and (7) evaluating the characteristics of the proposed method from various parametric viewpoints such as quality, payload capacity, and data security. Finally, the authors want to express our gratitude to the VEMUS team [28] for allowing us to use their MIDI database in the experiments; without their support of the MIDI files, this study cannot be completed.

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  1. Department of Computer and Communication Engineering, National Kaohsiung University of Science and Technology, No. 1 University Rd., Yanchao Dist, Kaohsiung City, 82445, Taiwan, Republic of China

    Yi-Hsin Liu & Da-Chun Wu

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  1. Yi-Hsin Liu
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  2. Da-Chun Wu
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Correspondence to Da-Chun Wu.

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Liu, YH., Wu, DC. A high-capacity performance-preserving blind technique for reversible information hiding via MIDI files using delta times. Multimed Tools Appl 79, 17281–17302 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-019-08526-9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-019-08526-9

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