Title: Turtle-shell data embedding method with high image fidelity

Authors: Guo-Hua Qiu; Chin-Feng Lee; Chin-Chen Chang

Addresses: School of Electronic and Information Engineering, Fuqing Branch of Fujian Normal University, Fuzhou 350300, China ' Department of Information Management, Chaoyang University of Technology, Taichung 41349, Taiwan ' Department of Information Engineering and Computer Science, Feng Chia University, Taichung 40724, Taiwan

Abstract: In this paper, a modified version of the turtle-shell data hiding (TDH) scheme is proposed, aiming at improving the quality of stego-image. TDH scheme was first proposed by Chang et al. in 2014. In comparison to other schemes at that time, the scheme exhibited a superior visual quality in the premise of ensuring high embedding capacity (EC). However, in the TDH scheme proposed by Chang et al., the rules to seek for the search space of the hiding message suffers the drawbacks of omitting the better alternative pixel pair. The scheme proposed in this paper modifies the embedding rule by allowing the selection of a proper region than the search space proposed by Chang et al., so as to better hide data and minimise the image distortion. According to the experimental results with the same EC, the visual quality of the stego-image in the proposed method is 0.41 dB higher than that of stego-image in Chang et al.'s method.

Keywords: data hiding; steganography; turtle-shell; visual quality; embedding capacity.

DOI: 10.1504/IJES.2021.113809

International Journal of Embedded Systems, 2021 Vol.14 No.2, pp.149 - 159

Received: 24 Oct 2019
Accepted: 04 Feb 2020
Published online: 31 Mar 2021 *

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