Secret-Fragment-Visible Mosaic Image Based Innovative Data Hiding Algorithm Implementation in the Digital Information Era

Abstract

In the era of digital information age, the internet has explored as decisive technology with its immense popularity and the user friendly interface to connect the entire world and it plays the important role in the development of innovative applications ranging from the normal to high level. Although, the internet has offered wide range of advantages but the applications based on it seriously suffer from lack of security. The digital images are the popular medium to perceive the information in the internet and providing the relevant security to them is the prominent research area and it is the research interest of this research paper.  Security has great importance in the image processing domain and it's applications, hiding the relevant information in digital images has been a area of interest from decades and maintaining the privacy of hidden information has utmost priority. Intense research work has carried out in the past to increase the data capacity, creating the secret image which look alike of target image but majority of the works fails to meet the requirements. A database independent approach is proposed in this work, a secret image is intelligently transformed to a secret fragment- visible mosaic image with same resolution in terms of appearance and this resolution (size) is of any selected target image. The generation of the mosaic image is followed by the sequential steps, i.e. division of the secret image into fragments and its relative color transformation into corresponding blocks of the target image. The simulation results are performed in the MATLAB programming language and the proposed results produce better results than the traditional data hiding methods.