An improvement of the data hiding scheme based on complete complementary codes

Abstract

Complete complementary code (CCC) is a spread spectrum sequence family with good correlation properties. A data hiding scheme based on CCC has been proposed and applied into image and audio signals. It is known that there is a trade-off between the payload of the embedded information and the quality of the stego media in general. In this study, we propose a method to improve the stego image quality without decreasing the quantity of the embedded secret data, and also without any bit errors in the extraction of the embedded message. The proposed strategy is based on two key ideas. One is employing independent embedding coefficient to each different embedded bit while the other is to replace the cover signal with the embedded signal approximately close to the cover signal. The effectiveness of the proposed method is evaluated through numerical experiments.