Large-capacity image data hiding based on table look-up

Data hiding, also known as information hiding and digital watermarking, refers to the technology of hiding secret information in publicly available media and making it difficult for people to feel its existence. According to the survival result of the hidden information when the stego media is processed, this technology can be divided into robust, semi-fragile, and fragile watermarking. Strong robust digital watermarking is technically difficult to achieve, so it is unrealistic to apply it for digital copyright protection at present. In contrast, fragile (and semi-fragile) watermarking has good feasibility and has been used for authentication and tamper localization of the stego media. However, the existing technology has limitations. To improve the sensitivity and positioning accuracy of tampering, some algorithms embed excessive data, which greatly reduces the fidelity of stego media. To prevent third parties from bypassing integrity authentication and tamper localization, some algorithms add complex encryption algorithms to achieve the confidentiality of hidden data, which not only greatly increases the computational cost, but also destroys the blindness of data extraction. To overcome these shortcomings, this paper proposes a lightweight large-capacity image data-hiding technology. Both the data hiding and data extraction are based on looking up a shared codebook table, so the computational cost on both sides is low. The codebook table can be flexibly customized according to the agreement of the sender and receiver of the stego image. It not only ensures the fidelity of stego image but also naturally provides the confidentiality of hidden data. The experimental results and analysis show that its comprehensive performance, including imperceptibility, capacity, complexity, security, and customizability, is better than various state-of-the-art fragile watermarking techniques. Thus, the proposed technique has obvious advantages when used in image authentication, tampering localization, source tracing, and steganography. The proposed technique can be flexibly extended to hide data in other media.