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Efficient halftone image steganography based on dispersion degree optimization

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Abstract

Halftone images are usually used in facsimile and halftone image steganography can be used for facsimile channel. In recent years, real-time image processing becomes more and more important. In this paper, an efficient block-based steganographic method for halftone images is proposed. This method is based on optimal dispersion degree (DD), which can measure the complexity of the region texture. To reduce the visual distortion, the blocks with complex texture can be selected as carriers according to the dispersion degree. Finally, the secret messages are embedded by flipping the pixels that can minimize the changes of texture structure. The experiments demonstrate that the proposed scheme maintains a good image visual quality and realizes acceptable statistical security with high capacity.

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Acknowledgements

This work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. U1736118), the National Key R&D Program of China (No. 2017YFB0802500), the Natural Science Foundation of Guangdong (No. 2016A030313350), the Special Funds for Science and Technology Development of Guangdong (No. 2016KZ010103), the Key Project of Scientific Research Plan of Guangzhou (No. 201804020068), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (No. 16lgjc83 and No. 17lgjc45).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Guangdong Key Laboratory of Information Security Technology, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, 510006, China

    Yingjie Xue, Wanteng Liu, Wei Lu, Yuileong Yeung, Xianjin Liu & Hongmei Liu

  2. State Key Laboratory of Information Security Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100093, China

    Wei Lu

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  1. Yingjie Xue
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  2. Wanteng Liu
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  3. Wei Lu
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  4. Yuileong Yeung
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  5. Xianjin Liu
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  6. Hongmei Liu
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Correspondence to Wei Lu.

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Xue, Y., Liu, W., Lu, W. et al. Efficient halftone image steganography based on dispersion degree optimization. J Real-Time Image Proc 16, 601–609 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11554-018-0822-8

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