A Novel Self-adaptive Quantum Steganography Based on Quantum Image and Quantum Watermark

摘要

Quantum steganography is an important branch of quantum information hiding. It integrates quantum secure communication technology and classical steganography, which embeds the secret information into public channel for covert communication. In this paper, based on the novel enhanced quantum representation (NEQR), a new quantum steganography algorithm is proposed to embed the secret information into the quantum carrier image and the quantum watermark image. The second least significant qubit (LSQb) of quantum carrier image is replaced with the secret information by implementing quantum circuit for good imperceptibility. Compared with the previous quantum steganography algorithms, the key shared by communicating parties can recover the secret information even if it was tampered while the tampers can be located effectively as well. In the experiment result, the Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) is calculated with different quantum carrier images and quantum watermark images, which demonstrates the imperceptibility is good.