Information Hiding In Image Enhancement

This paper proposes an information hiding method to embed data while executing image enhancement steps. The 2D Median Filter is adapted and re-engineered to demonstrate the feasibility of this concept. In particular, the filtering-embedding steps are performed for each pixel in a sliding window manner. Pixels enclosed within the predefined window (neighborhood) are gathered, linearized and sorted. Then, the linearized pixels are divided into partitions, in which each partition is assigned to represent a certain sequence of bits. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated by using the BSD300 dataset for various settings. The embedding capacity, image quality, data extraction error rate are reported and analyzed. Besides, the robustness of the proposed method against brute force attack is also discussed. In the best case scenario, when the window size is $7 \times 7, \sim 0.97$ bpp is achieved with acceptable image quality while having $\sim 3.5$% data extraction error rate.