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. 2022 Aug 16:8:e1062.
doi: 10.7717/peerj-cs.1062. eCollection 2022.

A novel steganography method for binary and color halftone images

Efe Çiftci  1 , Emre Sümer  2
Affiliations

A novel steganography method for binary and color halftone images

Efe Çiftci et al. PeerJ Comput Sci. .

Abstract

Digital steganography is the science of establishing hidden communication on electronics; the aim is to transmit a secret message to a particular recipient using unsuspicious carriers such as digital images, documents, and audio files with the help of specific hiding methods. This article proposes a novel steganography method that can hide plaintext payloads on digital halftone images. The proposed method distributes the secret message over multiple output copies and scatters parts of the message randomly within each output copy for increased security. A payload extraction algorithm, where plain carrier is not required, is implemented and presented as well. Results gained from conducted objective and subjective tests prove that the proposed steganography method is secure and can hide large payloads.

Keywords: Halftone image; Image processing; Plaintext payload; Secret sharing; Steganography.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1. Colors in a three-channel color halftone image.
Figure 2
Figure 2. (A–J) Binary patterns used for constructing halftone images.
Figure 3
Figure 3. Stages of converting a grayscale image into pattern-based halftone image.
(A) Source image, (B) Simpler image, (C) Final image.
Figure 4
Figure 4. Pattern method results on (A–B) binary and (C–D) color images.
Figure 5
Figure 5. Floyd-Steinberg coefficient filter.
Figure 6
Figure 6. Error diffusion method results on (A–B) binary and (C–D) color images.
Figure 7
Figure 7. Outputs of payload extraction attempts with different numbers of inputs.
Figure 8
Figure 8. Three test images from UC Merced Land Use Dataset.
(A) airplane80, (B) beach09, (C) forest22.
Figure 9
Figure 9. (A–I) SNR, PSNR and SSIM values of pattern-generated binary halftone images.
Figure 10
Figure 10. (A–I) SNR, PSNR and SSIM values of pattern-generated color halftone images.
Figure 11
Figure 11. (A–I) SNR, PSNR and SSIM values of error diffusion-generated binary halftone images.
Figure 12
Figure 12. (A–I) SNR, PSNR and SSIM values of error diffusion-generated color halftone images.
Figure 13
Figure 13. Extracted bytes from forest22 image using (A) three of four shares, (B) seven of eight shares, (C) 11 of 12 shares.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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