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Detection of steganography in quantum grayscale images

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Abstract

Quantum steganography is a tool using which the very act of communication can be concealed. To prevent steganography from being misused, the scheme of detection of least significant bit steganography in quantum images based on novel enhanced quantum representation of digital images is proposed. In this scheme, the quantum image is partitioning in pixel blocks at first. Then, according to how the value of the discrimination function f changes under the flipping function F, the pixel block can be divided into three types of groups that are regular group, singular group and unusable group, respectively. The number of regular and singular groups is used to determine whether the image is embedded with secret message and calculate the length (in percent of pixels) of secret message. A series of reversible logic circuits are designed to implement the scheme with the circuit complexity of \( {\rm O}\left( {q^{2} } \right) \), where q is the number of qubits to represent gray scale. Finally, simulation-based experiments demonstrate the feasibility of the detection of secret message in quantum gray images.

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Acknowledgements

This work is supported by the National Key R&D Plan under Grant Nos. 2018YFC1200200 and 2018YFC1200205, National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant No. 61463016 and “Science and technology innovation action plan” of Shanghai in 2017 under Grant No. 17510740300. And Scientific Research Fund of Hunan Provincial Education Department (Grant No. 18B420).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Information Engineering, Shanghai Maritime University, Shanghai, 201306, China

    Jia Luo, Ri-Gui Zhou, Wen-Wen Hu, Gao-Feng Luo & GuangZhong Liu

  2. Research Center of Intelligent Information Processing and Quantum Intelligent Computing, Shanghai, 201306, China

    Jia Luo, Ri-Gui Zhou, Wen-Wen Hu & Gao-Feng Luo

  3. College of Information Engineering, Shaoyang University, Shaoyang, 422000, China

    Gao-Feng Luo

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  1. Jia Luo
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Correspondence to Ri-Gui Zhou or GuangZhong Liu.

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Luo, J., Zhou, RG., Hu, WW. et al. Detection of steganography in quantum grayscale images. Quantum Inf Process 19, 149 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11128-020-02649-x

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