Title: An improved Sudoku-based data hiding scheme using greedy method

Authors: Chin-Chen Chang; Guo-Dong Su; Chia-Chen Lin

Addresses: Department of Information Engineering and Computer Science, Feng Chia University, 100 Wenhwa Road, Seatwen, Taichung 40724, Taiwan ' Department of Information Engineering and Computer Science, Feng Chia University, 100 Wenhwa Road, Seatwen, Taichung 40724, Taiwan; The School of Electronic and Information Engineering, Fuqing Branch of Fujian Normal University, Longjiang Street, Fuzhou, China; Engineering Research Center for ICH Digitalization and Multi-Source Information Fusion, Fuqing Branch of Fujian Normal University, Fujian, China ' Department of Computer Science and Information Management, Providence University, Taichung 433, Taiwan

Abstract: Inspired by Chang et al.'s scheme, an improved Sudoku-based data hiding scheme is proposed here. The major idea of our improved scheme is to find the approximate optimal solution of Sudoku using the greedy method instead of via a brute-force search for an optimal solution. Later, the found approximate optimal solution of Sudoku is used to offer satisfactory visual stego-image quality with a lower execution time during the embedding procedure. Simulation results confirmed that the average stego-image quality is enhanced by around 90.51% compared to Hong et al.'s scheme, with relatively less execution time compared to a brute-force search method.

Keywords: data hiding; Sudoku; greedy method; brute-force search method; approximate optimal solution.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCSE.2020.110177

International Journal of Computational Science and Engineering, 2020 Vol.23 No.1, pp.10 - 21

Received: 24 Jun 2019
Accepted: 03 Oct 2019
Published online: 08 Oct 2020 *

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