A novel, reversible, Chinese text information hiding scheme based on lookalike traditional and simplified Chinese characters

Compared to hiding information into digital image, hiding information into digital text file requires less storage space and smaller bandwidth for data transmission, and it has obvious universality and extensiveness. However, text files have low redundancy, so it is more difficult to hide information in text files. To overcome this difficulty, Wang et al. proposed a reversible information hiding scheme using left-right and up-down representations of Chinese characters, but, when the scheme is implemented, it does not provide good visual steganographic effectiveness, and the embedding and extracting processes are too complicated to be done with reasonable effort and cost. We observed that a lot of traditional and simplified Chinese characters look somewhat the same (also called lookalike), so we utilize this feature to propose a novel information hiding scheme for hiding secret data in lookalike Chinese characters. Comparing to Wang et al.'s scheme, the proposed scheme simplifies the embedding and extracting procedures significantly and improves the effectiveness of visual steganographic images. The experimental results demonstrated the advantages of our proposed scheme.