Greedy algorithm for image quality optimisation based on turtle-shell steganography
Guo Hua Qiu, Chin Feng Lee, Chin Chen Chang · International Journal of Computational Science and Engineering · 2020
Information hiding, also known as data hiding, is an emerging field that combines multiple theories and technologies. In recent years, Chang et al. and Liu et al. have proposed new data hiding schemes based on Sudoku, a turtle-shell, etc. These proposed schemes have their own advantages in terms of visual quality and embedded capacity. However, the reference matrices used in these schemes are not optimal. Based on the characteristics of these schemes, Jin et al. employed particle swarm optimisation to select the reference matrix and achieved approximately optimal results in reducing the distortion of the stego-image. However, the complexity is high. In this paper, a turtle-shell matrix optimisation scheme is proposed using a greedy algorithm. The experimental results show that our proposed greedy algorithm is better than the particle swarm optimisation scheme at finding a near-optimal matrix and achieving better stego-image quality, and it outperforms the particle swarm optimisation scheme in terms of computational amount and efficiency.