Robustness-to-Noise Analysis of A Secure High Capacity Full-gray-scale-Image Information Hiding Via A New DCT-Moments-Based Scheme

In recent years, attacks by hackers against digital images traveling in the internet have risen drastically. Noise is one of the most popular and effective attacks against digital images and signals, in general. In this paper, unlike the old classical watermarking way of embedding moments into moments, we introduce a new scheme that allows hiding moments of a hidden image into intensities of a carrier image. This new scheme proves to be very resilient and effective against unpredicted noise, up to a certain level, applied by a foreign source. In this proposed scheme, we embed DCT moments of a hidden and watermark gray level images into the intensities of an arbitrary carrier image of the same size as of the hidden and watermark. A random noise, with different noise levels, is applied to the produced watermarked image to analyze its effect on the extracted hidden image. To have a better feel of the new scheme robustness to noise, we compare it to a classical watermark scheme that is based on hiding DCT moments of the hidden image into DCT moments of the carrier. As we show here, the new scheme enables to recover a highly accurate hidden image compared to the classical scheme, where most of the data is damaged or lost. We also analyze the effect of the block size on the accuracy of the hidden extracted information in the presence of noise. We show how a resulting optimum block size of 16×16 is found to work well for a large variety of images.