Maximum energy block: a strategy for high visual security multi-image steganography

Abstract

Multi-image steganography is one of the important branches in protecting information. However, the steganographic or hiding capacity is greatly limited by the visual security. In this paper, we propose a new strategy named maximum energy block to identify the optimal hiding region of cover carrier, where multiple secret images can be hidden while causing an extremely minimal change of visual perception. This concept is enlightened by the fact that the human visual system is not sensitive to the grayscale variation in the areas of high energy and the edges or textures of complex. To furtherly minimize the visual impact of secret image on cover carrier and greatly extend the available steganographic space, a cover carrier of color video and the discrete wavelet transform are adopted. Thereby, one can screen out the high-frequency component of the highest energy block in video frames as the best-of-breed area for steganography, such that greatly increasing the difficulties of forensic. Meanwhile, multiple secret images are also compressed using 2D compressive sensing and then embedded into specified channels of different video frames based on a SHA256-based mapping, respectively. This operation can not only reduce the amount of hiding data and improve the steganographic capacity, but also bring about more safety and higher visual security. The secret images can be extracted and reconstructed accurately in the inverse process using correct keys. Experimental results verify the effectiveness of our method.

Graphical abstract

Keywords

multi-image steganography / maximum energy block / 2D compressive sensing / discrete wavelet transform / video frame / high-frequency component

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