Codebook Partition Based Steganography without Member Restriction

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Chiang, Yung-Kuei | Tsai, Piyu | Huang, Feng-Long

Affiliations: Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National United University Miaoli, 360, Taiwan. E-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]

Abstract: The practice of concealing secret messages into index-based images has generally suffered from problems of image quality degradation and hiding capacity restriction. A steganographic scheme using an improved codebook partition is proposed in this paper. The proposed scheme partitions the codebook into different member sub-clusters in terms of their similarity between the codewords for increasing the hiding capacity and reducing the image distortion. Any size of a subcluster was allowed in the proposed scheme, so as to improve the traditional approaches in which the size of a sub-cluster was restricted to the power of two. As a result of this revised scheme, an increased hiding capacity and a reduction in image distortion are obtained, as indicated from experimental results. The average performance of the proposed scheme is superior to that of those standard methods.

Keywords: index-based image, information hiding, steganography

Journal: Fundamenta Informaticae, vol. 82, no. 1-2, pp. 15-27, 2008