A Robust and High-Capacity Coverless Information Hiding Based on Combination Theory

Anggriani, Kurnia; Chiou, Shu-Fen; Wu, Nan-I; Hwang, Min-Shiang

doi:10.15388/23-INFOR521

Informatica

A Robust and High-Capacity Coverless Information Hiding Based on Combination Theory

Volume 34, Issue 3 (2023), pp. 449–464

Kurnia Anggriani Shu-Fen Chiou Nan-I Wu Min-Shiang Hwang

https://doi.org/10.15388/23-INFOR521

Pub. online: 15 June 2023 Type: Research Article

Open Access

Received
1 January 2023

Accepted
1 May 2023

Published
15 June 2023

Abstract

Many confidential multimedia, such as personal privacy, commercial, and military secrets, are transmitted on the Internet. To prevent this confidential multimedia from being eavesdropped on by illegal users, information-hiding technology is a leading research topic nowadays. One of the important research topics of information-hiding technology is coverless information hiding, which utilizes the unchanged property of its multimedia carrier to hide secret information. In this paper, we propose two schemes that employ the average pixel value of an image. The first is an extension of the Coverless Information Hiding Based on the Most Significant Bit (CIHMSB) scheme, referred to as E-CIHMSB. In the E-CIHMSB, we build an extended matrix containing the image fragment’s average pixel value. The second scheme is a combination theory-based CIHMSB, referred to as CB-CIHMSB. In the CB-CIHMSB, we construct the combined matrix. E-CIHMSB and CB-CIHMSB embed the secret bits by changing the most significant bits of the chosen pixel in the matrix. Experimental results show that our schemes achieved higher hiding capacity than previous related schemes. Moreover, the proposed scheme is more robust against steganalysis tools and image quality attacks such as Additive Gaussian White Noise (AWGN), Salt & Pepper noise, low-pass filtering attacks, and JPEG compression attacks than CIHMSB.

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Biographies

Anggriani Kurnia

K. Anggriani received her BS degree in informatics from University of Bengkulu, Indonesia, in 2011, and the MS degree in informatics from Bandung Institute of Technology, Indonesia, in 2014. She is a lecturer at the Department of Information System, Engineering Faculty, University of Bengkulu, Indonesia. Currently, she is pursuing her PhD degree in Asia University, Taiwan. Her current research interests include steganography and image processing.

Chiou Shu-Fen

S.-F. Chiou received the BBA degree in information management from National Taichung Institute of Technology, Taichung, Taiwan, ROC, in 2004. She studied for a MS degree in computer science and engineering at the National Chung Hsing University for one year, and then started to pursue her PhD degree. She received her PhD in computer science and engineering from National Chung Hsing University in 2012. She is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Information Management, National Taichung University of Science and Technology. Her current research interests include information security, network security, data hiding, text mining and big data analysis.

Wu Nan-I

N.-I Wu received his PhD from the Institute of Computer Science and Engineering, Nation Chung Hsing University (NCHU), Taichung, Taiwan 2009. From 2010 to 2011, he was a post-doctoral research fellow at the Academia Sinica Institute of Information Science. He was an assistant professor at the Department of Animation and Game Design, TOKO University (Taiwan), during 2011–2018, and an associate professor during 2018–2019. He was an associate professor at the Department of Digital Multimedia, Lee-Ming Institute of Technology (Taiwan) during 2019–2023. Now he is an associate professor at the Department of Information Management, Lunghwa University of Science and Technology (Taiwan) since 2023 and also the director of the eSports Training Centre since 2020. His current research interests include game design, eSports training/management, multimedia processing, multimedia security, data hiding, and privacy-preserving. He published over ten international journal papers (SCI) and conference papers.

Hwang Min-Shiang

mshwang@asia.edu.tw