A secure high capacity full-gray-scale-level multi-image information hiding and secret image authentication scheme via Tchebichef moments

• Authors: S. M. Elshoura;D. B. Megherbi
• Venue: Image Communication
• Year: 2013

The growth of image processing tools and applications has made it easy for multi-media content such as music, audio, and video to be manipulated or forged during transmission over the Internet. Efforts, such as information hiding in steganography, have been unable to secure data transmission and prevent its manipulation. Usage of coding theory, including cryptography, is not full proof in the sense that an unauthorized intruder may inject (tampering) and incorporate unintended data to the messages, which can tamper the transmitted data. There is a need for more transparent message information hiding schemes along with information content verification and authentication, as well as accurate tampering detection. In particular, as it is well known, in many current steganography methods, widely used for image information hiding, there are various technical challenges associated with hiding large amounts of image information in images. Some of these challenges relate to which locations, in a given carrier image, information has to be hidden in order to guarantee transparency of the resulting watermarked images, to the ability to extract hidden information accurately, to the performance of hidden secret information authentication and verification at the receiving end, to the dependency of the hidden information on a given carrier image, to the robustness of information hiding schemes to affine transformations such as rotation, and to the amount of data and number of full-scale images one can embed in a given single image carrier. Additionally, as it is well known, many of the existing stenography methods are based on the Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT), the Discrete Cosine Directors (DCT), or the Discrete Wavelength Transform (DWT) methods, which result in high Bit Error Rate (BER) of the extracted data. In this paper we present a secure high capacity image information hiding scheme where two full separate arbitrary full-scale gray level images (versus binary), one hidden information image and one authentication watermark image are hidden/embedded in the Tchebichef moments of a carrier image with very high imperceptibility. Here the second watermark image is used for identification and content integrity verification and authentication of the hidden secret image. Both the hidden secret hidden image and the authentication watermark image are of the same size as that of a given arbitrary carrier image. In particular, with the cost of computer memory getting lower and the bandwidth of transmission channels getting larger, we show how three different watermarked images, but the same to a naked eye, are produced and transmitted to achieve the desired advantages of high accuracy, security, authentication and verification of the recovered information. To the best of our knowledge, this two-full-scale gray images data hiding and hidden secret image information verification and authentication method is the first attempt of its sort. We show here the robustness of the proposed scheme to affine transformations such as rotation, scaling, and translation, the proposed scheme's high image malicious tampering detection and tampering localization and its high quality extracted recovered and authenticated hidden secret images. Additionally, in order to as much as possible keep the integrity of the received information, when watermarked images are rotated during transmission, a new image rotation estimation and recovery algorithm is presented as part of the proposed information hiding scheme. We show the effect of intended tampering attacks namely, cropping, noise, low-pass and high-pass filtering on the presented scheme. We also show how the extracted information accuracy is generally independent of the carrier image, and we present a mathematical analysis for characterizing the conditions under which transparency of the hidden embedded information is generally achieved for any given arbitrary carrier image. The case of how to extract the hidden information when one or two of the watermarked images is (are) lost is also tackled. Finally, experimental results on real images are presented to illustrate the efficiency and capabilities of the proposed method.