Improved exploiting modification direction steganography for hexagonal image processing

Abstract

Steganography has made significant advances in the Square-pixel-based Image Processing (SIP) domain, but to our knowledge, no work has yet been done in Hexel (Hexagonal Pixel)-based Image Processing (HIP). This paper presents a HIP-domain data hiding method that exploits and improves the SIP-domain Exploiting Modification Direction (EMD) embedding scheme. The proposed method, Hexagonal EMD (HexEMD), utilizes a HIP-domain cover image's hexagonal nature and infrastructure to embed the secret message. In standard digital imaging systems, the sensor portion that converts photonic energy into an analog electrical signal and all the subunits that digitize, process, and display this signal are based on square pixel logic, so there is currently no commercial equipment available to produce HIP-domain images. Thus, the image is first transformed into the HIP domain in software using the infrastructure developed in the project. Then the HIP-domain image is partitioned into non-overlapping heptads of the standard size, each containing seven hexels. Rather than embedding segments to the independent pixel pairs as done in SIP-domain EMD, we do the embedding iteratively in each heptad. Experimental results show that the HexEMD outperforms its SIP equivalent, EMD, by improving embedding capacity and achieving low visual quality distortion. © 2022 The Authors