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An Improved Intensity Factor of Correlation-Based Steganography Using M-Sequence and DCT

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Abstract

It is important to securely send information through the Internet; thus, technologies for safely exchanging information are required. One such technology is steganography, which conceals confidential data in multimedia. Although numerous embedding methods have been proposed, increasing embedding capacity, controlling image-quality degradation, and confidentiality are still issues that need to be addressed. There is a method that uses the correlation property of a maximum length sequence (M-sequence) to improve embedding capacity. However, since this method is used in watermarking, which is closely related to steganography, it cannot be directly applied to steganography, which requires a large amount of secret information to embed, because image quality would significantly degrade. We propose two steganography methods that use the correlation property of M-sequence. Particularly, we focused on the improvement of the intensity factor, which is a factor of image-quality degradation. As a result, a significant improvement in image quality was achieved.

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Data availability

The datasets generated during the current study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

These research results were obtained from the commissioned research (No. 05201) by National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT), Japan. This work was supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Numbers 19K11947, 22K12015, 22K12036.

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Correspondence to Kaito Onuma.

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Onuma, K., Miyata, S. An Improved Intensity Factor of Correlation-Based Steganography Using M-Sequence and DCT. SN COMPUT. SCI. 5, 12 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42979-023-02361-4

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