Quality Compressed Steganography Using Hidden Referenced Halftoning

Abstract

Block truncation coding is an efficient compression technique while offering good image quality. Nonetheless, the blocking effect inherent in BTC causes severe perceptual artifact in high compression ratio applications. In this paper, an error-diffused block truncation coding (EDBTC) is proposed to solve this problem. According to the EDBTC, the error caused by the difference between the original grayscale pixel value and the correspondingly high or low mean substitute is diffused to the predefined neighborhood, and hence the average grayscale will be maintained invariably. In addition, since the compressed data are widely distributed in the internet transmission, the extra message delivering in a secret way also highly raises attention recently. In this paper, we propose the compressed steganography using Hidden Referenced Halftoning (CSHRH), which cooperates with error diffusion and ordered dithering to achieve the objective of secret communication in BTC images. As documented in the experimental results, a low complexity with good image quality approach is obtained. Moreover, CSHRH is extended to secret-sharing steganography (SSS) and color extension steganography (CES). The SSS is able to distribute message into multiple host images and hence improves the security. The CES is able to deliver secure message via color embedded CSHRH image. Both extensions are also with an extra benefit of achieving high capacity message convection.