A secure, self-recovery, and high capacity blind digital image information hiding and authentication scheme using DCT moments
O. Habbouli, Dalila B. Megherbi · 2017
Secure digital image communications on the internet and via networked systems is important in many multimedia commercial, government, and defense applications. Cyber security attacks on various image data by anonymous unauthorized hackers, with the aim to intercept, corrupt or deny access to the data, have seen a significant increase in recent years. In many homeland security applications, digital information hiding, and image watermarking have seen an increased interest by researchers, given the crucial need of protecting critical information that could threaten our nation security. In data information hiding or watermarking schemes, information is generally hidden either in the spatial domain of the carrier image, or in the carrier image transform such as Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT), Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT), Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT). In this paper we show, for the first time, a secure, high capacity, authentication, tampering localization, and self-recovery scheme that embeds, with very high imperceptibility, and hides DCT moments of several full gray-scale hidden images (as opposed to binary) and several full gray-scale watermarking images, of the same full size as a given arbitrary carrier host image. The information is embedded into the intensities (as opposed to the DCT moments as is the case of existing classical schemes, in general) of a host carrier image. We show how the proposed algorithm has self-recovery capability to recover most lost information in case of unauthorized cropping attacks from hackers. The objective is the ability, via a blind scheme where the carrier not required/known at the receiving end, to (a) hide 8 arbitrary full gray-scale images into an arbitrary carrier image using two different scales (b) to make the carrier image independent of any given arbitrary hidden image(s), (c) the ability to use arbitrary carrier images that are unknown to the general public and never previously used, for security reason to make sure that the extracted images will not be an easy target to tampering or hacking from a third party who may recognize a popular given carrier image. Finally, experimental results are presented below to show the potential of the proposed method, especially to unauthorized cropping attacks.