A cellular automata based secured reversible data hiding scheme for dual images using bit-reversal permutation technique

Abstract

With the rapid development of advanced communication technology, protection of confidential data during transmission through public channel has become a challenging issue. In this context, the design of a data hiding scheme needs to ensure reversibility, robustness against various malicious attacks, and unaltered visual quality even after embedding high amount of secret data. To meet the above requirements, Cellular Automata along with Bit-Reversal Permutation technique have been utilized on dual-image with the target to enhance the robustness of suggested scheme due to distribution of secret information within two stego images which is hard to extract without both stego simultaneously. The proposed scheme makes a trade-off among visual quality, security and embedding capacity as essential for ensuring innocuous communication. The experimental results and comparison with the state-of-art methods establishes that the proposed scheme ensures high degree of robustness against different venomous attacks. This approach may be beneficial to private and public sector practitioners and government agencies to protect valuable multimedia secret data from adversarial cyber attacks.