A progressive secret reveal system based on SPIHT image transmission

摘要

In this paper, a novel secret-revealing system is proposed. The proposed system directly embeds a secret message in an encoded cover image. The set partitioning in hierarchical trees (SPIHT) technique is employed to encode the cover image. The bit stream of a list of significant pixels encoded during the SPIHT encoding process is exploited to hide the secret message. The hiding capacity of each SPIHT encoding stage is determined according to the number of extracted significant coefficients. In addition, an adaptive embedding mechanism is designed to increase the hiding capacity with little loss of image quality. To sum up, three characteristics are achieved in this system. First, a secret message is directly embedded in a SPIHT-encoded cover image. Second, the compression rate of the cover image is adaptive. Third, the hidden secret message is extracted progressively during the SPIHT decoding process.