A Security-enhanced Steganography Scheme for RGBE-format HDR Images

Recently, the research of introducing data hiding techniques to High Dynamic Range (HDR) images has drawn much attention in academia. Yu et al. utilizes the homogeneity in RGBE format, one popular format of HDR, to propose a steganography scheme. The attractive contribution of Yu et al.’s scheme is the cover images are demonstrated only with slight and ignorable distortions after embedding. Unfortunately, Yu et al.’s steganography scheme may potentially lead an eavesdropper to arise suspicions because of the multiplication and division in the embedding process causing the abnormal distribution of pixel values. In this paper, a security-enhanced steganography scheme is proposed to avoid the potential security weakness by post-process: using additional random numbers to change the value of pixels. The experimental results accordingly show that the proposed scheme does improve the security level while achieving reasonable imperceptibility.