An image embedding in image by a complexity based region segmentation method

Abstract

This paper describes a new technique to embed secret data into a dummy image by using image segmentation based on a local complexity measure. The key idea to this approach is that a binary image can be categorized as "informative" and "noise-like" regions which are segmented by a "complexity measure". If the embedding data is noise-like, we can hide it in the noise-like region of the dummy image. If a part of embedding data is simple, then we apply "image conjugate" operation to it. This operation transform a simple pattern into a complex pattern. In our experiment, we could embed two color images in a 512/spl times/512 (8 bits/pixel) size gray image (which was dummy) without losing any information. The total amount of the two embedded images was 115 KB, which was about 45% of the dummy image.