Information Hiding Using Coverless Steganography System Based on Image Generation

Abstract

Image generation plays an important role for designing a robust coverless steganography system able to face different information hiding challenges. This paper proposes an image generation- based coverless steganography system which has the capability to transmit the secret message safely. The generated image is similar to the famous Quick Response (QR) code image; it is called semi-QR code in that paper. The proposed system consists of two processes, the first process, secret message hiding process, is used at the sender of the message and is responsible for generating the semi-QR code image from only the secret message bits using the hiding algorithm. While the second process, secret message extraction process, is used by the receiver of the message who can retrieve the secret message from the received semi-QR code image using the extraction algorithm. Finally, a coverless steganography system that implements the proposed algorithms has been built. To evaluate the effectiveness of these algorithms, experiments have been carried out using different evaluation measures, namely the Bit Error Rate (BER) and Success Rate (SR). The results confirmed that the proposed system is better than other traditional steganography systems achieving higher capacity and a higher level of robustness than them.