298 research outputs found
Improvement of JPEG compression efficiency using information hiding and image restoration
The application of information hiding to image compression is investigated to improve compression efficiency for JPEG color images. In the proposed method, entropy-coded DCT coefficients of chrominance components are embedded into DCT coefficients of the luminance component. To recover an image in the face of the degradation caused by compression and embedding, an image restoration method is also applied. Experiments show that the use of both information hiding and image restoration is most effective to improve compression efficiency
Invertible Rescaling Network and Its Extensions
Image rescaling is a commonly used bidirectional operation, which first
downscales high-resolution images to fit various display screens or to be
storage- and bandwidth-friendly, and afterward upscales the corresponding
low-resolution images to recover the original resolution or the details in the
zoom-in images. However, the non-injective downscaling mapping discards
high-frequency contents, leading to the ill-posed problem for the inverse
restoration task. This can be abstracted as a general image
degradation-restoration problem with information loss. In this work, we propose
a novel invertible framework to handle this general problem, which models the
bidirectional degradation and restoration from a new perspective, i.e.
invertible bijective transformation. The invertibility enables the framework to
model the information loss of pre-degradation in the form of distribution,
which could mitigate the ill-posed problem during post-restoration. To be
specific, we develop invertible models to generate valid degraded images and
meanwhile transform the distribution of lost contents to the fixed distribution
of a latent variable during the forward degradation. Then restoration is made
tractable by applying the inverse transformation on the generated degraded
image together with a randomly-drawn latent variable. We start from image
rescaling and instantiate the model as Invertible Rescaling Network (IRN),
which can be easily extended to the similar decolorization-colorization task.
We further propose to combine the invertible framework with existing
degradation methods such as image compression for wider applications.
Experimental results demonstrate the significant improvement of our model over
existing methods in terms of both quantitative and qualitative evaluations of
upscaling and colorizing reconstruction from downscaled and decolorized images,
and rate-distortion of image compression.Comment: Accepted by IJC
Framework for reversible data hiding using cost-effective encoding system for video steganography
Importances of reversible data hiding practices are always higher in contrast to any conventional data hiding schemes owing to its capability to generate distortion free cover media. Review of existing approaches on reversible data hiding approaches shows variable scheme mainly focussing on the embedding mechanism; however, such schemes could be furthermore improved using encoding scheme for optimal embedding performance. Therefore, the proposed manuscript discusses about a cost-effective scheme where a novel encoding scheme has been used with larger block sizes which reduces the dependencies over larger number of blocks. Further a gradient-based image registration technique is applied to ensure higher quality of the reconstructed signal over the decoding end. The study outcome shows that proposed data hiding technique is proven better than existing data hiding scheme with good balance between security and restored signal quality upon extraction of data
A NOVEL JOINT PERCEPTUAL ENCRYPTION AND WATERMARKING SCHEME (JPEW) WITHIN JPEG FRAMEWORK
Due to the rapid growth in internet and multimedia technologies, many new
commercial applications like video on demand (VOD), pay-per-view and real-time
multimedia broadcast etc, have emerged. To ensure the integrity and confidentiality of
the multimedia content, the content is usually watermarked and then encrypted or vice
versa. If the multimedia content needs to be watermarked and encrypted at the same
time, the watermarking function needs to be performed first followed by encryption
function. Hence, if the watermark needs to be extracted then the multimedia data
needs to be decrypted first followed by extraction of the watermark. This results in
large computational overhead. The solution provided in the literature for this problem
is by using what is called partial encryption, in which media data are partitioned into
two parts - one to be watermarked and the other is encrypted. In addition, some
multimedia applications i.e. video on demand (VOD), Pay-TV, pay-per-view etc,
allow multimedia content preview which involves „perceptual‟ encryption wherein all
or some selected part of the content is, perceptually speaking, distorted with an
encryption key. Up till now no joint perceptual encryption and watermarking scheme
has been proposed in the literature.
In this thesis, a novel Joint Perceptual Encryption and Watermarking (JPEW)
scheme is proposed that is integrated within JPEG standard. The design of JPEW
involves the design and development of both perceptual encryption and watermarking
schemes that are integrated in JPEG and feasible within the „partial‟ encryption
framework. The perceptual encryption scheme exploits the energy distribution of AC
components and DC components bitplanes of continuous-tone images and is carried
out by selectively encrypting these AC coefficients and DC components bitplanes.
The encryption itself is based on a chaos-based permutation reported in an earlier
work. Similarly, in contrast to the traditional watermarking schemes, the proposed
watermarking scheme makes use of DC component of the image and it is carried out
by selectively substituting certain bitplanes of DC components with watermark bits.
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Apart from the aforesaid JPEW, additional perceptual encryption scheme, integrated
in JPEG, has also been proposed. The scheme is outside of joint framework and
implements perceptual encryption on region of interest (ROI) by scrambling the DCT
blocks of the chosen ROI.
The performances of both, perceptual encryption and watermarking schemes are
evaluated and compared with Quantization Index modulation (QIM) based
watermarking scheme and reversible Histogram Spreading (RHS) based perceptual
encryption scheme. The results show that the proposed watermarking scheme is
imperceptible and robust, and suitable for authentication. Similarly, the proposed
perceptual encryption scheme outperforms the RHS based scheme in terms of number
of operations required to achieve a given level of perceptual encryption and provides
control over the amount of perceptual encryption. The overall security of the JPEW
has also been evaluated. Additionally, the performance of proposed separate
perceptual encryption scheme has been thoroughly evaluated in terms of security and
compression efficiency. The scheme is found to be simpler in implementation, have
insignificant effect on compression ratios and provide more options for the selection
of control factor
Information similarity metrics in information security and forensics
We study two information similarity measures, relative entropy and the similarity metric, and methods for estimating them. Relative entropy can be readily estimated with existing algorithms based on compression. The similarity metric, based on algorithmic complexity, proves to be more difficult to estimate due to the fact that algorithmic complexity itself is not computable. We again turn to compression for estimating the similarity metric. Previous studies rely on the compression ratio as an indicator for choosing compressors to estimate the similarity metric. This assumption, however, is fundamentally flawed. We propose a new method to benchmark compressors for estimating the similarity metric. To demonstrate its use, we propose to quantify the security of a stegosystem using the similarity metric. Unlike other measures of steganographic security, the similarity metric is not only a true distance metric, but it is also universal in the sense that it is asymptotically minimal among all computable metrics between two objects. Therefore, it accounts for all similarities between two objects. In contrast, relative entropy, a widely accepted steganographic security definition, only takes into consideration the statistical similarity between two random variables. As an application, we present a general method for benchmarking stegosystems. The method is general in the sense that it is not restricted to any covertext medium and therefore, can be applied to a wide range of stegosystems. For demonstration, we analyze several image stegosystems using the newly proposed similarity metric as the security metric. The results show the true security limits of stegosystems regardless of the chosen security metric or the existence of steganalysis detectors. In other words, this makes it possible to show that a stegosystem with a large similarity metric is inherently insecure, even if it has not yet been broken
Recovering Sign Bits of DCT Coefficients in Digital Images as an Optimization Problem
Recovering unknown, missing, damaged, distorted or lost information in DCT
coefficients is a common task in multiple applications of digital image
processing, including image compression, selective image encryption, and image
communications. This paper investigates recovery of a special type of
information in DCT coefficients of digital images: sign bits. This problem can
be modelled as a mixed integer linear programming (MILP) problem, which is
NP-hard in general. To efficiently solve the problem, we propose two
approximation methods: 1) a relaxation-based method that convert the MILP
problem to a linear programming (LP) problem; 2) a divide-and-conquer method
which splits the target image into sufficiently small regions, each of which
can be more efficiently solved as an MILP problem, and then conducts a global
optimization phase as a smaller MILP problem or an LP problem to maximize
smoothness across different regions. To the best of our knowledge, we are the
first who considered how to use global optimization to recover sign bits of DCT
coefficients. We considered how the proposed methods can be applied to
JPEG-encoded images and conducted extensive experiments to validate the
performances of our proposed methods. The experimental results showed that the
proposed methods worked well, especially when the number of unknown sign bits
per DCT block is not too large. Compared with other existing methods, which are
all based on simple error-concealment strategies, our proposed methods
outperformed them with a substantial margin, both according to objective
quality metrics (PSNR and SSIM) and also our subjective evaluation. Our work
has a number of profound implications, e.g., more sign bits can be discarded to
develop more efficient image compression methods, and image encryption methods
based on sign bit encryption can be less secure than we previously understood.Comment: 13 pages, 8 figure
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