Many existing steganographic methods hide more secret data into edged areas than smooth areas in the host image, which does not differentiate textures from edges and causes serious degradation in actual edge areas. To avoid abrupt changes in image edge areas, as well as to achieve better quality of the stego-image, a novel image data hiding technique by adaptive Least Significant Bits (LSBs) substitution is proposed in this paper. The scheme exploits the brightness, edges, and texture masking of the host image to estimate the number k of LSBs for data hiding. Pixels in the noise non-sensitive regions are embedded by a k-bit LSB substitution with a lager value of k than that of the pixels in noise sensitive regions. Moreover, an optimal pixel adjustment process is used to enhance stego-image visual quality obtained by simple LSB substitution method. To ensure that the adaptive number k of LSBs remains unchanged after pixel modification, the LSBs number is computed by the high-order bits rather than all the bits of the image pixel value. The theoretical analyses and experiment results show that the proposed method achieves higher embedding capacity and better stegoimage quality compared with some existing LSB methods.

先前众多的DWT(discrete wavelet transform)域水印算法几乎都是私有水印或易脆水印,而针对版权保护的鲁棒的、公开的小波域水印算法却极少.在充分考虑人类视觉系统掩蔽特性的基础上,首先给出基于图像分块的临界噪声阈值矩阵JND(just noticed difference),进而提出了一种基于DWT的鲁棒公开水印技术.算法首先把原图像各8×8块按Hilbert扫描顺序排列,然后在原图像分块的Hilbert序列中选取两相邻块分别进行一层DWT,再结合各分块JND阈值,通过不同强度地调整两相邻块各对应细节子带均值之间的大小关系以自适应地嵌入水印.嵌入水印具有很好的透明性,水印嵌入强度是与原图像特征相自适应的.同时,水印的提取无须求助于原图像.此外,实验结果也证明,该算法对常见图像处理操作、有损压缩和裁剪、挤压、像素移位等几何变换有较高的鲁棒性,特别是信号增强操作处理几乎不影响水印的正确提取,所以该算法是有效和实用的.