Secret image transmission based on VQ and data embedding

  • Authors:
  • Shih-Chieh Shie;Shinfeng D. Lin

  • Affiliations:
  • Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Formosa University, 64 Wen-Hua Road, Hu-Wei, Yunlin County, Taiwan 632, Republic of China;Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Dong Hwa University, Hualien County, Taiwan, Republic of China

  • Venue:
  • International Journal of Imaging Systems and Technology
  • Year:
  • 2007

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

A new secret image transmission scheme suitable for narrow communication channel is proposed in this article. A set of secret images can be simultaneously and efficiently delivered to the receiver via a small and meaningless data stream by the proposed scheme. To reduce the volume of secret images, a codebook is first generated and these secret images are encoded into binary indexes based on the vector quantization (VQ) technique. The compressed message is then embedded into the VQ codebook utilized in the encoding procedure by an adaptive least-significant-bits (LSB) modification technique. For the purpose of security, the slightly modified codebook is further encrypted into a meaningless data stream by the AES cryptosystem. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme provides an impressive improvement both in the visual quality of the extracted secret images at the receiver and in the hiding capacity of the cover medium. Experimental data also reveal the feasibility of the proposed secret image transmission scheme for limited-bandwidth environment. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Int J Imaging Syst Technol, 17, 1–9, 2007