Image based information hiding via minimization of entropy and randomization

In this paper, a new approach that can effectively and securely hide information into color images with significantly improved security and hiding capacity is proposed. The proposed approach performs information hiding in three major steps. As the first step, two binary sequences are constructed from the least significant bits in the pixels of a cover image and the information that needs to be embedded, the information entropies of both sequences are minimized with a dynamic programming method. In the second step, the resulting sequences are randomly reshuffled into randomized sequences with mappings based on a set of one-dimensional chaotic systems, a single binary sequence can be obtained by a matching operation performed between the two randomized sequences. Finally, an inverse mapping is applied to the sequence obtained in the second step, and the transformed sequence is embedded into the least significant bits in the pixels of the cover image. Both analysis and experiments show that the proposed approach can achieve guaranteed performance in both security and capacity for long binary sequences. In addition, a comparison with other state-of-the-art methods for image-based information hiding suggests that the proposed approach can achieve significantly improved performance and is promising for practical applications.