• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.18 no.1
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• pp.170-191
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• 2024

The transmission of confidential data using cover media is called steganography. The three requirements of any effective steganography system are high embedding capacity, security, and imperceptibility. The text file's structure, which makes syntax and grammar more visually obvious than in other media, contributes to its poor imperceptibility. Text steganography is regarded as the most challenging carrier to hide secret data because of its insufficient redundant data compared to other digital objects. Unicode characters, especially non-printing or invisible, are employed for hiding data by mapping a specific amount of secret data bits in each character and inserting the character into cover text spaces. These characters are known with limited spaces to embed secret data. Current studies that used Unicode characters in text steganography focused on increasing the data hiding capacity with insufficient redundant data in a text file. A sequential embedding pattern is often selected and included in all available positions in the cover text. This embedding pattern negatively affects the text steganography system's imperceptibility and security. Thus, this study attempts to solve these limitations using the Part-of-speech (POS) tagging technique combined with the randomization concept in data hiding. Combining these two techniques allows inserting the Unicode characters in randomized patterns with specific positions in the cover text to increase data hiding capacity with minimum effects on imperceptibility and security. Format-preserving encryption (FPE) is also used to encrypt a secret message without changing its size before the embedding processes. By comparing the proposed technique to already existing ones, the results demonstrate that it fulfils the cover file's capacity, imperceptibility, and security requirements.

• Journal of Information Processing Systems
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• v.10 no.2
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• pp.256-270
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• 2014

A new morphed steganographic algorithm is proposed in this paper. Image security is a challenging problem these days. Steganography is a method of hiding secret data in cover media. The Least Significant Bit is a standard Steganographic method that has some limitations. The limitations are less capacity to hide data, poor stego image quality, and imperceptibility. The proposed algorithm focuses on these limitations. The morphing concept is being used for image steganography to overcome these limitations. The PSNR and standard deviation are considered as a measure to improve stego image quality and morphed image selection, respectively. The stego keys are generated during the morphed steganographic embedding and extracting process. Stego keys are used to embed and extract the secret image. The experimental results, which are based on hiding capacity and PSNR, are presented in this paper. Our research contributes towards creating an improved steganographic method using image morphing. The experimental result indicates that the proposed algorithm achieves an increase in hiding capacity, stego image quality, and imperceptibility. The experimental results were compared with state of the art steganographic methods.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.20 no.9
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• pp.1723-1729
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• 2016

Digital watermarking is tried to get an optimum tradeoffs between its performance characteristics, robustness, transparency and capacity. This paper is, therefore, suggesting a watermarking technique that builds multiple barcodes in various frequency bands to implement embedded watermarks that is imperceptible and robust against various attacks. Even though a watermark technique with duplicated barcode watermarks embedded in various frequency bands can satisfy robustness as there is high possibility that watermarks embedded in an image remains after various attacks, the duplicated barcode data can weaken imperceptibility. Thus, to satisfy the conflicting characteristic requirements of watermarks, robustness and imperceptibility, different barcode data is embedded in each frequency band. The test shows that ownership authentication with the technique suggested in this thesis does not require specialized hardware, and extracted watermarks can be easily identified through a mobile barcode scanner app, which allows low complexity, low cost and swift identification.

• Journal of Electrical Engineering and Technology
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• v.13 no.1
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• pp.476-484
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• 2018

The high capacity audio watermarking algorithms are facing a main challenge in satisfying the robustness against attacks especially on de-synchronization attacks. In this paper, a robust and a high capacity algorithm is proposed using segment selection, Stationary Wavelet Transform (SWT) and the Quantization Index Modulation (QIM) techniques along with new synchronization mechanism. The proposed algorithm provides enhanced trade-off between robustness, imperceptibility, and capacity. The achieved watermarking improves the reliability of the available watermarking methods and shows high robustness towards signal processing (manipulating) attacks especially the de-synchronization attacks such as cropping, jittering, and zero inserting attacks. For imperceptibility evaluation, high signal to noise ratio values of above 22 dB has been achieved. Also subjective test with volunteer listeners shows that the proposed method has high imperceptibility with Subjective Difference Grade (SDG) of 4.76. Meanwhile, high rational capacity up to 176.4 bps is also achieved.

• Journal of information and communication convergence engineering
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• v.16 no.3
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• pp.179-188
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• 2018

This paper proposes a quick response (QR) barcode watermarking algorithm in order to improve readability of the QR barcode in a JPEG image. The proposed algorithm embeds a watermark in a wavelet based-low frequency band for watermark robustness, and visually extracts a QR barcode after embedding the QR barcode image with confidential information into the original image via imperceptible watermarking technology. The visually extracted QR barcode watermark uses an approach to authenticate the ownership more easily through a common hardware and software-based mobile barcode reader app. Therefore, the QR barcode watermark may improve the ability to easily detect watermarks efficiently as well as imperceptibility and robustness, which is the main watermark requirement by embedding the QR barcode with watermark text information in a digital image and when compare to conventional watermarks.

• Journal of Advanced Navigation Technology
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• v.9 no.2
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• pp.170-176
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• 2005

In this paper, we proposed watermarking algorithm based on wavelet transform. Discrete wavelet transform is involved to calculate additive energy strength. Considering imperceptibility, after computing contrast and texture sensitivity in gray-level image, we inserted watermark with variable weight due to the feature of coefficient block. Consequently, applying human visual system, the experimental results showed that the proposed algorithm satisfied the properties of robustness and imperceptibility that are the major conditions of watermarking.

• Journal of Information Processing Systems
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• v.15 no.2
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• pp.271-287
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• 2019

The synchronization scheme based on moving average is robust and suitable for the same rule to be adopted in embedding watermark and synchronization code, but the imperceptibility and search efficiency is seldom reported. The study aims to improve the original scheme for robust audio watermarking. Firstly, the survival of the algorithm from desynchronization attacks is improved. Secondly, the scheme is improved in inaudibility. Objective difference grade (ODG) of the marked audio is significantly changed. Thirdly, the imperceptibility of the scheme is analyzed and the derived result is close to experimental result. Fourthly, the selection of parameters is optimized based on experimental data. Fifthly, the search efficiency of the scheme is compared with those of other synchronization code schemes. The experimental results show that the proposed watermarking scheme allows the high audio quality and is robust to common attacks such as additive white Gaussian noise, requantization, resampling, low-pass filtering, random cropping, MP3 compression, jitter attack, and time scale modification. Moreover, the algorithm has the high search efficiency and low false alarm rate.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.8 no.3
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• pp.379-388
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• 2005

Image steganography Is a secret communication scheme to transmit a secret message, which is embedded into an image. The original image and the embedded image are called the cover image and the stego image, respectively. In other words, a sender embeds a secret message into a cover image and transmits a stego image to a receiver, while the receiver takes the stego image, extracts the message from it, and reads the message. General requirements for steganography are great capacity of secret messages, imperceptibility of stego images, and confidentiality between a sender and a receiver. In this paper, we propose a method for being satisfied with three requirements. In order to hide a secret message into a cover image safely, we use a difference value of two consecutive pixels and a secret quantization range. The former is used for the imperceptibility and the latter for the confidentiality. Furthermore, the number of insertion bits is changed according to the difference value for the imperceptibility. Through experiments, we have shown that our method is more good quality of stego images than many other related methods and increases the amount o( message insertion by performing dual insertion processing for some pixels.

• Journal of the Institute of Convergence Signal Processing
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• v.3 no.3
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• pp.36-40
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• 2002

In this paper, we proposed a digital watermarking method based on the edge-wavelet transform to protect digital contents copyrights. We find out the optimal watermark insertion region and the proper amount of watermark in order to satisfy robustness and imperceptibility against various attacks such as noise, compression, collusion, clipping, scaling. Especially through this experiment, we could find out the adequate location of watermark insertion and proper amount of watermark and it is also viewed to satisfy robustness and imperceptibility in the lower frequency region with small watermark quantity.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.10 no.9
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• pp.4603-4624
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• 2016

In this paper, a new reversible watermarking algorithm with adaptive embedding threshold matrix is proposed. Firstly, to avoid the overflow and underflow, two flexible thresholds, TL and TR, are applied to preprocess the image histogram with least histogram shift cost. Secondly, for achieving an optimal or near optimal tradeoff between the embedding capacity and imperceptibility, the embedding threshold matrix, composed of the embedding thresholds of all blocks, is determined adaptively by the combination between the composite chaos and the average energy of Integer Wavelet Transform (IWT) block. As a non-liner system with good randomness, the composite chaos is suitable to search the optimal embedding thresholds. Meanwhile, the average energy of IWT block is calculated to adjust the block embedding capacity, and more data are embedded into those IWT blocks with larger average energy. The experimental results demonstrate that compared with the state-of-the-art reversible watermarking schemes, the proposed scheme has better performance for the tradeoff between the embedding capacity and imperceptibility.