Accelerated cover selection steganography

Abstract

Information hiding represents a constantly growing field mainly consisting of digital watermarking and steganography. Both deal with inserting additional information into multimedia. Basically, watermarking protects the multimedia content against unauthorized manipulation whereas steganography utilizes multimedia in the role of a cover object for unauthorized secret message transmission. This article deals with additional technique to steganography which can decrease an impact to cover image after an embedding process. The goal is to find an optimal image from a cover image database based on bits of the secret message. With 2,000 image database, cover selection method can decrease impact by 10% in comparison to the same embedding method without cover selection. Disadvantage lays in a time consumption. In this article, there is proposed a novel accelerated cover selection method. Acceleration is achieved by optimal shortening of a secret message for comparative process.