期刊名称：International Journal of Security and Its Applications
印刷版ISSN：1738-9976
出版年度：2015
卷号：9
期号：6
页码：279-298
DOI：10.14257/ijsia.2015.9.6.27
出版社：SERSC
摘要：Embedding data into smooth regions introduces stego-images with poor security and visual quality. Edge adaptive steganography, in which the flat regions are not employed to carry a message at low embedding rates, was proposed. However, for the high embedding rates, smooth regions are contaminated to hide a secret message. In this paper, we present an adaptive multi-layer block data-hiding (MBDH) algorithm, in which the embedding regions are adaptively selected according to the number of the secret message bits and the texture characteristic of a cover-image. Via employing the MBDH algorithm, more secret message bits are embedded into the sharp regions. Therefore, the smooth regions are not used, even at high embedding rates. Furthermore, most of edge adaptive steganography algorithms have a limited capacity when the smooth regions are not employed in data hiding. The proposed scheme solves this issue when it can embed more secret bits into the selected regions while the perceptual quality of stego-images is still maintained. The experimental results were evaluated on 10,000 natural gray-scale images. The visual attack, targeted steganalysis, and universal steganalysis are employed to examine the performance of the proposed scheme. The results show that the new scheme significantly overcomes the previous edge-based approaches and least significant bit (LSB) based methods in term of security and visual quality.
