A novel data hiding scheme for color images based on GSBTC

To prevent content transmitted over the Internet, such as text, voice or even images, from being detected by potential interceptors, data hiding technology has been developed. The key point of this paper is to demonstrate how to embed a secret image into the compression codes generated by the GSBTC algorithm, such as the means of each color plane and the common bitmap of each block in a color cover image. Experiments have confirmed that the proposed scheme does allow legal receivers to retrieve secret images while keeping them hidden from predators. Although the original common bitmaps and the means of the color cover image are modified to hide the secret images, the difference between the PSNRs generated by original GSBTC and our scheme is not significant. Moreover, the size of compression codes generated by original GSBTC is the same as that generated by our hiding scheme. Therefore, attackers will not be able to sense the difference and thus detect hidden messages. Even if they do, our scheme can still combine the DES algorithm or the permutation function to enhance the security of the secret images.