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A steganographic scheme based on the Wada index

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Abstract

A steganographic technique based on the Wada index is proposed in this paper. The definition of a perfect covering of the carrier image is introduced. Perfect coverings are used to produce a unique representation of the carrier image what enables the consecutive modification of pixels in the carrier image without destructing Wada indexes in previous overlapping observation windows. The only required information for the decoding step is the stego image itself. The stego image is split into dichotomous shares according to the Wada index. The decoding scheme is based on the disjunction of shares with odd indexes. Computational experiments are used to demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed scheme. The proposed steganographic scheme based on the Wada index ensures that the secret image is not leaked from the modified bit planes with lowest indexes, the stego image is robust against RS steganalysis algorithms, and the payload capacity of the carrier image is comparable to grayscale LSB schemes.

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Data Availability

The datasets generated during and/or analysed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

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    1. Department of Mathematical Modelling, Kaunas University of Technology, Studentu 50-146, Kaunas, 51368, Lithuania

      Loreta Saunoriene & Minvydas Ragulskis

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    Loreta Saunoriene and Minvydas Ragulskis contributed equally to this work.

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    Saunoriene, L., Ragulskis, M. A steganographic scheme based on the Wada index. Multimed Tools Appl 82, 40503–40529 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-023-14888-y

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