Open Access

ARTICLE

Data Hiding in AMBTC Images Using Selective XOR Hiding Scheme

Yung-Yao Chen^1,*, Yu-Chen Hu², Ting-Kai Yang³, You-An Wang³
1 Department Electronic and Computer Engineering, National Taiwan U. Science and Technology, Taipei, 106, Taiwan
2 Department Computer Science and Information Management, Providence University, Taichung, 433, Taiwan
3 Grad. Inst. Automation Technology, National Taipei University of Technology, Taipei, 106, Taiwan
* Corresponding Author: Yung-Yao Chen. Email:
(This article belongs to this Special Issue: AI-Aided Innovative Cryptographic Techniques for Futuristic Secure Computing Systems)

Computers, Materials & Continua 2022, 71(3), 5167-5182. https://doi.org/10.32604/cmc.2022.023993

Received 29 September 2021; Accepted 22 November 2021; Issue published 14 January 2022

Abstract

Nowadays since the Internet is ubiquitous, the frequency of data transfer through the public network is increasing. Hiding secure data in these transmitted data has emerged broad security issue, such as authentication and copyright protection. On the other hand, considering the transmission efficiency issue, image transmission usually involves image compression in Internet-based applications. To address both issues, this paper presents a data hiding scheme for the image compression method called absolute moment block truncation coding (AMBTC). First, an image is divided into non-overlapping blocks through AMBTC compression, the blocks are classified four types, namely smooth, semi-smooth, semi-complex, and complex. The secret data are embedded into the smooth blocks by using a simple replacement strategy. The proposed method respectively embeds nine bits (and five bits) of secret data into the bitmap of the semi-smooth blocks (and semi-complex blocks) through the exclusive-or (XOR) operation. The secret data are embedded into the complex blocks by using a hidden function. After the embedding phase, the direct binary search (DBS) method is performed to improve the image quality without damaging the secret data. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method yields higher quality and hiding capacity than other reference methods.

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Keywords

Content protection technology; security for image data; absolute moment block truncation coding (AMBTC); direct binary search (DBS)

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