A Novel Coverless Information Hiding Method

L.Yangetal.:NovelCoverlessIHMethodBasedontheMSBoftheCoverImageFIGURE1.Thedifferencebetweenencryptionandinformationhiding.Traditionalinformationhidingtechnologiesaregenerallydividedintospatialinformationhiding,frequencyinforma-tionhidingandadaptiveinformationhiding[5].LSB(LeastSignificantBits)informationhidingalgorithmisaclassicalonebasedonspatialinformationhidingalgorithm,whichrealizesthehidingofsecretinformationbychangingtheleastsignificantbitofimagepixel[6].In2019,AdityaKumarSahuandGandharbaSwainimprovedtworeversibledatahiding(RDH)methodsbasedondualimageleastsignificantbit(LSB)matchingandn-rightmostbitreplacement(n-RBR)[7].Intheirworks,peaksignal-to-noiseratio(PSNR)andembeddingcapacity(EC)wereimprovedgreatly.However,itstillfallsintothecategoryoftraditionalinformationhiding,asitmodifiesthepixelsofthestegoimage,leavingtracetosteganographicanalysistools.In2006,Nietal.[8]firstpro-posedaninformationhidingalgorithmbasedonhistogramtranslation.Thebasicideabasedonhistogramtranslationinformationhidingalgorithmistodrawthehistogramofeachgrayvalue,findthegrayvaluewiththemostoccurrenceasthepeakpointP,andfindthegrayvaluewiththeleastoccurrenceasthezerovaluepointZ.ThenitshiftsthepixelsbetweenPandZ,makingroomforhidinginformation.In2003,Tian[9]proposedthedifferenceextension(DE)algorithm.Itusedthecorrelationbetweenadjacentpixelstohidesecretinformation.Althoughitisnoteasytodetectedbyeyes,whenthespatialdomainembeddingmechanismperformingthemodificationtocoverimage,theembeddedinformationissensitivetothei