Jianyi Liu¹, Ru Zhang^1,*, Jing Li², Lei Guan³, Cheng Jie², Jiaping Gui⁴

CMC-Computers, Materials & Continua, Vol.68, No.2, pp. 2633-2649, 2021, DOI:10.32604/cmc.2021.016605

Abstract Reversible data hiding in encrypted image (RDHEI) is a widely used technique for privacy protection, which has been developed in many applications that require high confidentiality, authentication and integrity. Proposed RDHEI methods do not allow high embedding rate while ensuring losslessly recover the original image. Moreover, the ciphertext form of encrypted image in RDHEI framework is easy to cause the attention of attackers. This paper proposes a reversible data hiding algorithm based on image camouflage encryption and bit plane compression. A camouflage encryption algorithm is used to transform a secret image into another meaningful target image, which can cover both… More >

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

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 payload. In this paper, a… 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

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 hide data within clothes. The… 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

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 preserved in the 3D version.… 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

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 within the threshold range are… 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

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 adaptive embedding mechanism would effectively… 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

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 decoding side. Peak-signal-noise-to-ratio (PSNR) and… More >

Sahib Khan^{1, *}, Arslan Arif¹, Syed Tahir Hussain Rizvi², Nasir Ahmad³

CMES-Computer Modeling in Engineering & Sciences, Vol.117, No.1, pp. 1-16, 2018, DOI:10.31614/cmes.2018.04141

Abstract Cryptography and steganography are two important and related fields of infor- mation security. But, steganography is slightly different in the sense that it hides the ex- istence of secret information from unauthorized users. It is one of the most appealing research domains, have applications like copyright protection, data integrity protection and manipulation detection. Several steganography techniques have been proposed in literature. But, in this work a new information hiding algorithm is presented. The proposed technique de-correlates frequency components of cover image using discrete cosine transform and uses the least significant bits of frequency components for hiding secret information. The tech-nique… 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 number of bits are embedded.… 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 the lesion area accurately for… More >