A Novel Approach for Data Hiding in Binary Image for Secret Communication and Authentication

Abstract

Nowadays, digital photographs, videos, and soundtracks are widely used, which have replaced the world of analog signals. Digital representations bring many advantages over analog systems, like lossless recording or copying, convenient network distribution, and easy editing and modification. Unfortunately, these advantages also present severe problems like easy forging, copyright violation, problematic authentication, illegal copying, and distribution. Many applications frequently transport large amounts of data as binary images. The security of transferred visible and invisible data is of prime concern. Hiding confidential data inside the image secretly provides a means for overcoming these problems. Data hiding is the art of hiding secret data for secret communication or authentication in a cover medium without any perceptional distortion of the original medium. It evolved as the need for some applications like copyright protection, embedded captioning, secret communications, and tamper detection. Data hiding may be classified in different ways based on the relative importance of the cover and message signals, the nature of cover content, the need for an unmodified cover signal for the message, signal extraction, type of communication, and type of attacks to remove hidden messages. Most prior works on data hiding in images are for color and grayscale images in which pixels take a wide range of values. For these images, changing pixel values by a small amount is generally unnoticeable by human eyes. For images in which the pixels take only two colors, hiding data without causing visible artifacts becomes more challenging. For binary images, randomly flipping white or black pixels is likely to introduce visible artifacts. newlineData hiding in binary images needs identification of locations in the image where the data, such as a watermark or secret message, can be secretly embedded. Hence, image processing is a primary concern for the same.