Title: The analysis of stego image visual quality for a data hiding scheme based on two-layer turtle shell matrix

Authors: Ji-Hwei Horng; Xiao-Zhu Xie; Chin-Chen Chang

Addresses: Department of Electronic Engineering, National Quemoy University, Kinmen 89250, Taiwan ' Department of Computer Science, Xiamen University of Technology, Xiamen 361024, China; Department of Information Engineering and Computer Science, Feng Chia University, Taichung 40724, Taiwan ' Department of Information Engineering and Computer Science, Feng Chia University, Taichung 40724, Taiwan; School of Computer Science and Technology, Hangzhou Dianzi University, Hangzhou 310018, China

Abstract: In 2018, Xie et al. proposed a novel data hiding scheme based on two-layer turtle shell matrix. In their scheme, they claimed that their stego image visual quality is superior to that of the state-of-the-art methods, regardless of the features of cover images. In this research note, we make a theoretical analysis of stego image quality for Xie et al.'s (2018) method based on the symmetrical characteristic of the matrix. Furthermore, we found that their simulation outcomes do not reveal the fact that their embedding capacity is larger than those of the data hiding methods proposed previously under the same stego image visual quality. More simulations are made to reveal that our experimental outcomes coincide with the results of our theoretical analysis. Furthermore, the experimental results made by Xie et al. (2018) have also been corrected.

Keywords: theoretical analysis; two-layer turtle shell; data hiding.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCSE.2020.113178

International Journal of Computational Science and Engineering, 2020 Vol.23 No.4, pp.336 - 340

Received: 02 May 2020
Accepted: 08 Jul 2020
Published online: 23 Feb 2021 *

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