Secure Halftone Image Steganography Based on Pixel Density Transition

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

5-1-2021

Abstract

Most state-of-the-art halftone image steganographic techniques only consider the flipping distortion according to the human visual system, which are not always secure when they are attacked by steganalyzers. In this paper, we propose a halftone image steganographic scheme that aims to generate stego images with good visual quality and strong statistical security of anti-steganalysis. First, the concept of pixel density is proposed and a novel construction called pixel density histogram (PDH) is proposed to design a '\pm 1±1 embedding' scheme for halftone images. Then, we optimize density pair selection to select density blocks that can improve visual quality. Finally, the messages are embedded through pixel density transition, where a novel pixel flipping strategy is proposed, which can maintain the structural dependence by optimizing the pixel mesh Markov transition matrix (PMMTM). The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed steganography scheme can achieve strong statistical security of anti-steganalysis with good visual quality without degrading the embedding capacity.

Identifier

85105984888 (Scopus)

Publication Title

IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing

External Full Text Location

https://doi.org/10.1109/TDSC.2019.2933621

e-ISSN

19410018

ISSN

15455971

First Page

1137

Last Page

1149

Issue

3

Volume

18

Grant

2019B010136002

Fund Ref

National Natural Science Foundation of China

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