A Two-Layer Steganography for Mosaic Images

• Ji-Hwei Horng,
• Chin-Chen Chang,
• Kun-Sheng Sun,

Vol. 15, No. 9, September 30, 2021
10.3837/tiis.2021.09.012, Download Paper (Free):

• Data Hiding
• mosaic image
• polarized mask
• strong embedding
• weak embedding

Abstract

A lot of data hiding schemes have been proposed to embed secret data in the plain cover images or compressed images of various formats, including JPEG, AMBTC, VQ, etc. In this paper, we propose a production process of mosaic images based on three regular images of coffee beans. A primary image is first mimicked by the process to produce a mosaic cover image. A two-layer steganography is applied to hide secret data in the mosaic image. Based on the low visual quality of the mosaic cover image, its PSNR value can be improved about 1.5 dB after embedding 3 bpp. This is achieved by leveraging the newly proposed polarized search mask and the concepts of strong embedding and weak embedding. Applying steganography to the mosaic cover images is a completely new idea and it is promising.

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