An Secret Communication-Oriented High Performance Information Hiding Scheme Based on CARDBAL2 and Pixel Field Structure

Abstract

Propose a new image processing method which named Pixel Field Structure (PFS). The direction of PFS represents the information. Take advantage of the feature that the energy of the image would gather and spread on four components (LL2, LH2, HL2 and HH2) in the sub-image after first-order CARDBAL2 multi-wavelet transform. Propose an Information Hiding Algorithm based on modifying the direction of PFS in four CARDBAL2 first-order sub-images. The maximum change of direction angle is usually less than π/2k. The information is divided into two parts, one part is embedded in LL2 and HH2, and the other part is embedded in LH2 and HL2. Use the Chebyshev chaotic map, Knight's Tour traversal and the genetic algorithm to improve the consistence of the embedded data bits’ order and the character of the sub-image. Experimental results indicate that the proposed scheme can increase invisibility and robustness separately by 31.69% and 24.16% averagely, and has certain ability against steganalysis such as Higher Order Statistics based on wavelet coefficients. Moreover, the scheme has excellent sensitivity of image processing.