Halftone Image Steganography with Distortion Measurement Based on Structural Similarity

Abstract

For halftone image data hiding, it is difficult to achieve good visual quality and statistical security when high embedding capacity is demanded. In this paper, a secure steganographic scheme for halftone image is proposed, which aims to minimize the embedding distortion on structural similarity. Structural distortions are the ones that affect the most the perception of degradation of a halftone image. To evaluate the structural distortions caused by flipping pixels, halftone image structural similarity (HSSIM) is introduced based on a human visual filter, which is trained by Least-Mean-Square (LMS) approach. Utilizing the HSSIM, a distortion measurement is proposed to evaluate the embedding distortions on both vision and statistics. To minimize the embedding distortions, syndrome-trellis code (STC) is employed in the embedding process. The experimental results have demonstrated that the proposed steganographic scheme can achieve high statistical security with good visual quality without degrading the embedding capacity. © 2020, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.