Chaotic system-based secure data hiding scheme with high embedding capacity

In recent years, data hiding has emerged as one of the main research areas in digital security. There are plenty of schemes to hide the secret data into the least significant bit planes of an image. Most of them either traverse the image pixels according to the scanning methods or using some structural fixed patterns. Researchers have proposed data hiding techniques with an orientation of hiding the content of the information, but algorithms are known publicly. Hence, the secret data is prone to be revealed easily. To provide higher security, several methods have been proposed that determine data hiding locations using certain patterns/formula. Chaotic systems have also been effectively utilized to devise secret key based data hiding algorithms. This alleviates the problem of easy retrieval even if the embedding algorithm is known. The present paper proposes a chaotic system based data hiding scheme that provides high payload as well as imperceptibility. In addition, the scheme exhibits excellent performance in terms of data security. (C) 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.