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High-capacity steganography: a global-adaptive-region discrete cosine transform approach

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Abstract

An increasing number of spatial and frequency domain data hiding techniques have been proposed to address the relatively low embedding capacities of image-based steganography. These techniques have brought promise of higher embedding capacities, albeit at the expense of lower perceptibility. This work proposes a new discrete cosine transform (DCT) approach for color image steganography and implements a global-adaptive-region (GAR) embedding scheme that allows for extremely high embedding capacities while maintaining enhanced perceptibility. The idea is to adapt the variable region size, used to hide the data, in each DCT block of the cover image to the amount of correlation of the image values in the corresponding block. We will demonstrate how this new technique achieves enhanced hiding capacities and perceptibility compared to other spatial, Fourier, and adaptive-region DCT based steganography schemes.

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Notes

  1. For JPEG standard the block size m×m is 8×8

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments that helped improve the original manuscript. This work was funded by the College of Graduate Studies and Research at the University of Sharjah under research grant number 15020403005-P for 2015.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Associate Professor of Computer Engineering, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Sharjah, Sharjah, United Arab Emirates

    Tamer Rabie

  2. Professor & Chair, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Sharjah, Sharjah, United Arab Emirates

    Ibrahim Kamel

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  1. Tamer Rabie
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  2. Ibrahim Kamel
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Correspondence to Tamer Rabie.

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Rabie, T., Kamel, I. High-capacity steganography: a global-adaptive-region discrete cosine transform approach. Multimed Tools Appl 76, 6473–6493 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-016-3301-x

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-016-3301-x

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