Title: Partial-duplicate image retrieval based on HSV colour space for coverless information hiding

Authors: Ningsheng Zhao; Zhili Zhou; Lingzhi Liao

Addresses: School of Computer and Software, Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology, Nanjing, China ' Jiangsu Engineering Centre of Network Monitoring and School of Computer and Software, Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology, Nanjing, China ' School of Computer and Software, Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology, Nanjing, China

Abstract: In conventional image steganography approaches, modification traces will be left in the designated cover images. Consequently, the secret information could be possibly detected by steganalysis tools. In this paper, a coverless image steganography approach based on partial-duplicate image retrieval is proposed to hide images without modification. First, we divide equally any given query or database image into a set of image blocks. Then, for a given query image, we search for its partial-duplicate images in a large-scale database according to the similarity between the HSV colour features of image blocks. Finally, these retrieved partial-duplicate images are used to represent and hide the secret image. Moreover, we propose an encryption algorithm based on chaotic maps to ensure the security of our approach. Both the theoretical analysis and experimental results demonstrate that the proposed coverless image steganography approach has good security, high robustness and strong resistance to the existing steganalysis tools.

Keywords: information hiding; coverless image steganography; HSV; image retrieval; partial-duplicate image.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCSE.2019.099675

International Journal of Computational Science and Engineering, 2019 Vol.19 No.1, pp.15 - 24

Received: 12 Aug 2017
Accepted: 21 May 2018
Published online: 20 May 2019 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article