Approach to secret content tagging on color images with a Sudoku-based scrambling principle

At present, there has been much focus on information hiding because it acts as an alternative to secure communication. Secret content is embodied in an image using various image embodiment techniques, with the least significant bit (LSB) substitution being one of the preferred strategies. Asserting the originality and quality of the content embodiment is equally challenging. A scrambling mechanism using a Sudoku scheme is applied on all red, green, and blue layer blocks of the image. The image layers are devised into blocks, and over the blocks unique scrambling procedures are applied to acquire the scrambled image. The scrambled image is then exposed to the confidential stream embodiment using the traditional LSB substitution scheme by following the chess game-based queen tour traversal pattern for locating the pixels. After the embedding process, the scrambled image is fragmented into blocks, and the exact descrambling of the blocks is performed to get back the image, which visually resembles the original image called the stego image. The stego image gets split into blocks at the receiver end to apply exact scrambling on the corresponding blocks, and using the queen tour pattern, the secret stream is to be extracted. As a result of the experiments, it is found that the projected approach is unlikely to be very predictable and unique in its patterns. (c) 2023 SPIE and IS&T