A Secure Algorithm for Image Based Information Hiding with One-dimensional Chaotic Systems

The goal of information hiding is to securely hide important information within digital documents such as files, images and videos. In this paper, we develop a new method that can efficiently and securely embed a sequence of binary bits into a gray-scale image in two stages. In the first stage, the sequence is divided into a few subsequences of equal length and a set of one-dimensional logistic mappings are used to shuffle the binary bits in the sequence. In the second stage, the shuffled sequence is divided into regions of equal length and the regions are sequentially embedded into the corresponding pixels in the given gray-scale image. The embedding of a region in the shuffled sequence is performed by replacing the least significant bits of the gray value of the corresponding pixel with the bits in the region. Analysis and testing results show that this information hiding algorithm can securely embed information into a gray-scale image without altering the content of image significantly and thus can potentially be used in practice for secure image-based information hiding.