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

Many confidential multimedia, such as personal privacy, commercial, and military se-crets, are transmitted on the Internet. To prevent this confidential multimedia from being eaves-dropped 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 hid-ing, 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.

Automated summary

Protecting confidential multimedia transmitted online is an important research topic, and information-hiding technology plays a crucial role in this aspect. This paper proposes two schemes that utilize the average pixel value of an image to hide secret information, achieving higher hiding capacity and better robustness against steganalysis tools and image quality attacks compared to previous schemes.