Enhancing Secret Image Authentication Through Encryption-Based Steganography with Reversible Watermarking

Reversible data hiding is a special technique primarily used for embedding a secret image that can be later restored from the watermarked image. The image encryption algorithms have been developed based on the Chaotic Logistic-Sine Coupling map (CLSM) While these algorithms perform well in the steganography process there is still room for further development to enhance the level of security they offer. The implementation of the algorithm and its security have been partially analysed using statistical measures like sensitivity to the key space and pixel correlation. Depending on the specific application the CLSM can be computationally intensive making it less suitable for real-time image processing on low-resource devices. To ensure authentication, the MATLAB standard image is exclusively utilized for converting the secret image and embedding it using the Multi-Region Watermark Mechanism (MRWM) designed for color images. In this paper, the Histogram Equalization is utilized feature region is selected and processed and watermarking is performed multiple times due to overlapping feature regions. Comparatively, the results obtained using CLSM show a PSNR of 65.99, MSE of 0.0120, and SSIM of 0.9998 on the MATLAB standard image, surpassing other existing models like Pixel Value Ordering (PVO) and Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) demonstrating superior image performance.