A Novel LSB Matching Algorithm Based on Information Pre-Processing

• DOI: 10.3390/math10010008
• Publication Date: 2021-12-21T14:50:43Z
• Authors: Yongjin Hu; Xiyan Li; Jun Ma
• Keywords: quadtree; data hiding; QA1-939; 0202 electrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineering; halftone; 02 engineering and technology; golden ratio; data hiding; halftone; quadtree; LSB matching; golden ratio; LSB matching; Mathematics

This paper analyzes random bits and scanned documents, two forms of secret data. The secret data were pre-processed by halftone, quadtree, and S-Box transformations, and the size of the scanned document was reduced by 8.11 times. A novel LSB matching algorithm with low distortion was proposed for the embedding step. The golden ratio was firstly applied to find the optimal embedding position and was used to design the matching function. Both theory and experiment have demonstrated that our study presented a good trade-off between high capacity and low distortion and is superior to other related schemes.