Al Hussien Seddik Saad^1,*, M. S. Mohamed^2,3, E. H. Hafez⁴

CMC-Computers, Materials & Continua, Vol.67, No.2, pp. 2077-2091, 2021, DOI:10.32604/cmc.2021.015329 - 05 February 2021

Abstract Current image steganography methods are working by assigning an image as a cover file then embed the payload within it by modifying its pixels, creating the stego image. However, the left traces that are caused by these modifications will make steganalysis algorithms easily detect the hidden payload. A coverless data hiding concept is proposed to solve this issue. Coverless does not mean that cover is not required, or the payload can be transmitted without a cover. Instead, the payload is embedded by cover generation or a secret message mapping between the cover file and the… More >

Al Hussien Seddik Saad^1,*, E. H. Hafez², Zubair Ahmad³

CMC-Computers, Materials & Continua, Vol.67, No.1, pp. 659-674, 2021, DOI:10.32604/cmc.2021.014758 - 12 January 2021

Abstract Steganography has been used to prevent unauthorized access to private information during transmission. It is the scheme of securing sensitive information by concealing it within carriers such as digital images, videos, audio, or text. Current steganography methods are working by assigning a cover file then embed the payload within it by making some modifications, creating the stego-file. However, the left traces that are caused by these modifications will make steganalysis algorithms easily detect the hidden payload. Aiming to solve this issue, a novel, highly robust steganography method based on hacking anti-shoplifting systems has proposed to… More >

Ji-Hwei Horng¹, Juan Lin^2,*, Yanjun Liu³, Chin-Chen Chang^3,4,*

CMES-Computer Modeling in Engineering & Sciences, Vol.125, No.2, pp. 879-906, 2020, DOI:10.32604/cmes.2020.09355 - 12 October 2020

Abstract By embedding secret data into cover images, image steganography can produce non-discriminable stego-images. The turtle shell model for data hiding is an excellent method that uses a reference matrix to make a good balance between image quality and embedding capacity. However, increasing the embedding capacity by extending the area of basic structures of the turtle shell model usually leads to severe degradation of image quality. In this research, we innovatively extend the basic structure of the turtle shell model into a three-dimensional (3D) space. Some intrinsic properties of the original turtle shell model are well More >

Lingfeng Qu¹, Hongjie He¹, Shanjun Zhang², Fan Chen^{1, *}

CMC-Computers, Materials & Continua, Vol.65, No.3, pp. 2623-2638, 2020, DOI:10.32604/cmc.2020.09723 - 16 September 2020

Abstract Reversible data hiding in encrypted images (RDH-EI) technology is widely used in cloud storage for image privacy protection. In order to improve the embedding capacity of the RDH-EI algorithm and the security of the encrypted images, we proposed a reversible data hiding algorithm for encrypted images based on prediction and adaptive classification scrambling. First, the prediction error image is obtained by a novel prediction method before encryption. Then, the image pixel values are divided into two categories by the threshold range, which is selected adaptively according to the image content. Multiple high-significant bits of pixels More >

Junxiang Wang^{1, *}, Lin Huang¹, Ying Zhang¹, Yonghong Zhu¹, Jiangqun Ni², Yunqing Shi³

CMC-Computers, Materials & Continua, Vol.64, No.1, pp. 325-344, 2020, DOI:10.32604/cmc.2020.09784 - 20 May 2020

Abstract To measure the security for hot searched reversible data hiding (RDH) technique, especially for the common-used histogram-shifting based RDH (denoted as HS-RDH), several steganalysis schemes are designed to detect whether some secret data has been hidden in a normal-looking image. However, conventional steganalysis schemes focused on the previous RDH algorithms, i.e., some early spatial/pixel domain-based histogram-shifting (HS) schemes, which might cause great changes in statistical characteristics and thus be easy to be detected. For recent improved methods, such as some adaptive prediction error (PE) based embedding schemes, those conventional schemes might be invalid, since those… More >

Yi Chen¹, Hongxia Wang^{2, *}, Xuyun Zhang³

CMC-Computers, Materials & Continua, Vol.63, No.2, pp. 911-922, 2020, DOI:10.32604/cmc.2020.08027 - 01 May 2020

Abstract This paper presents a reversible data hiding (RDH) method, which is designed by combining histogram modification (HM) with run-level coding in H.264/advanced video coding (AVC). In this scheme, the run-level is changed for embedding data into H.264/AVC video sequences. In order to guarantee the reversibility of the proposed scheme, the last nonzero quantized discrete cosine transform (DCT) coefficients in embeddable 4×4 blocks are shifted by the technology of histogram modification. The proposed scheme is realized after quantization and before entropy coding of H.264/AVC compression standard. Therefore, the embedded information can be correctly extracted at the More >

Shaowei Weng^{1, 2, *}, Yiyun Liu¹, Yunqing Shi³, Bo Ou⁴, Chunyu Zhang⁵, Cuiping Wang⁶

CMC-Computers, Materials & Continua, Vol.62, No.1, pp. 157-177, 2020, DOI:10.32604/cmc.2020.05681

Abstract This paper proposes a two-step general framework for reversible data hiding (RDH) schemes with controllable contrast enhancement. The first step aims at preserving visual perception as much as possible on the basis of achieving high embedding capacity (EC), while the second step is used for increasing image contrast. In the second step, some peak-pairs are utilized so that the histogram of pixel values is modified to perform histogram equalization (HE), which would lead to the image contrast enhancement. However, for HE, the utilization of some peak-pairs easily leads to over-enhanced image contrast when a large… More >

Xingxing Xiao¹, Yang^1,*, Rui Li², Weiming Zhang³

CMC-Computers, Materials & Continua, Vol.60, No.1, pp. 101-115, 2019, DOI:10.32604/cmc.2019.05293

Abstract The medical industry develops rapidly as science and technology advance. People benefit from medical resource sharing, but suffer from privacy leaks at the same time. In order to protect patients’ privacy and improve quality of medical images, a novel reversible data hiding (RDH) scheme based on lesion extraction and with contrast enhancement is proposed. Furthermore, the proposed scheme can enhance the contrast of medial image's lesion area directly and embed high-capacity privacy data reversibly. Different from previous segmentation methods, this scheme first adopts distance regularized level set evolution (DRLSE) to extract lesion and targets at… More >

Wengui Su^1,2, Xiang Wang^3,*, Yulong Shen¹

CMC-Computers, Materials & Continua, Vol.59, No.3, pp. 925-941, 2019, DOI:10.32604/cmc.2019.04842

Abstract With the reversible data hiding method based on pixel-value-ordering, data are embedded through the modification of the maximum and minimum values of a block. A significant relationship exists between the embedding performance and the block size. Traditional pixel-value-ordering methods utilize pixel blocks with a fixed size to embed data; the smaller the pixel blocks, greater is the embedding capacity. However, it tends to result in the deterioration of the quality of the marked image. Herein, a novel reversible data hiding method is proposed by incorporating a block merging strategy into Li et al.’s pixel-value-ordering method,… More >

Zhonghao Li¹, Laijin Meng¹, Shutong Xu¹, Zhaohong Li^1,2,*, Yunqing Shi³, Yuanchang Liang¹

CMC-Computers, Materials & Continua, Vol.59, No.2, pp. 563-574, 2019, DOI:10.32604/cmc.2019.05565

Abstract Steganalysis is a technique used for detecting the existence of secret information embedded into cover media such as images and videos. Currently, with the higher speed of the Internet, videos have become a kind of main methods for transferring information. The latest video coding standard High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) shows better coding performance compared with the H.264/AVC standard published in the previous time. Therefore, since the HEVC was published, HEVC videos have been widely used as carriers of hidden information.
In this paper, a steganalysis algorithm is proposed to detect the latest HEVC video steganography… More >