Efficient Cost-Reduced With High-Quality Image of Imperceptible Steganography Using Modulo and Magic Cube

• Published in: IEEE access Vol. 10; pp. 67686 - 67693
• Main Authors: Ko, Hung-Jui, Huang, Cheng-Ta, Tseng, Hsueh-Wen, Wang, Shiuh-Jeng
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Piscataway IEEE 2022; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Data transmission; Decimals; Digital imaging; Encryption; Image quality; Information hiding; magic cube; Matrices; modulus operation; Steganography; Three-dimensional displays; Videos; Visualization; Watermarking
• ISSN: 2169-3536; 2169-3536
• DOI: 10.1109/ACCESS.2022.3185120

Information hiding techniques are used to hide confidential data in digital carriers. It is difficult for malicious users to detect the existence of confidential data within the digital carriers. Audios, images, or videos can call be digital carriers. Information hiding includes steganography and watermarking. Watermarking is used for copyright protection. Steganography is used to protect confidential data transmission from malicious attackers. Imperceptibility and capacity are always the major concerns in steganography. In this paper, we propose an efficient steganography method for images using modulus operation and magic cube. The partial secret message bits are converted into decimals and then mapped to a predefined cube. The coordinates of the mapped position were embedded into the cover image using modulus operation. We obtain the stego-image quality better than 42 dB, while the payload is 3 bpp. The experimental results demonstrated that the proposed method has a higher capacity than previous works. Meanwhile, our method also maintain high imperceptibility. Furthermore, modulus operation can reduce the computational overhead of the proposed method.