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Towards a high capacity coverless information hiding approach

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Abstract

Most of the coverless information hiding approaches use a set of cover images as stego-images which make them unsuitable for real-time applications. Moreover, the parameters that affect the hiding capacity and the robustness against image processing attacks are not explicitly studied. This paper explores the effectiveness of coverless information hiding using only one cover image to transmit secret information based on eigen decomposition. The proposed approach performs coverless information hiding by establishing mapping relationships between the hash codes of the image blocks and the characters of the secret message. The hash code is calculated by splitting the block into 9 sub-blocks and then comparing the largest eigenvalues of the sub-blocks according to four arrangements. To speed up the embedding process, we build a lookup table to store the pre-computed hash codes with the corresponding block locations. The approach has three important parameters: overlapping blocks, arrangements of sub-blocks, and block sizes. Several experiments are conducted to analyze the effect of these parameters on performance. The results of the analyses indicate that the overlapping between image blocks is necessary to generate a sufficient number of unique hash codes. Otherwise, the embedding process could not be completed using a single image. The arrangement between sub-blocks has a lower impact on the number of unique hash codes and the resilience against image processing attacks. The block size is another important parameter. As the block size increases, the hiding capacity decreases and the resilience against image processing attacks improves. Compared with other coverless information hiding approaches, the proposed approach has a higher hiding capacity and better resilience against image processing attacks. Moreover, the approach has short execution time and better resistance to detecting tools.

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Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Mustansiriyah University / Baghdad / Iraq for its support in the present work.

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  1. Computer Engineering Department, Engineering College, Mustansiriyah University, Baghdad, Iraq

    Fatimah Shamsulddin Abdulsattar

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  1. Fatimah Shamsulddin Abdulsattar
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Correspondence to Fatimah Shamsulddin Abdulsattar.

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Abdulsattar, F.S. Towards a high capacity coverless information hiding approach. Multimed Tools Appl 80, 18821–18837 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-021-10608-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-021-10608-6

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