An Improved Multiplicative Spread Spectrum Embedding Scheme for Data Hiding

This paper presents an improved multiplicative spread spectrum (IMSS) embedding scheme for data hiding. We first analyze the error probability of the conventional multiplicative spread spectrum (MSS) scheme and derive the corresponding channel capacity and security level. It is noted that the interference effect of the host signal causes the distribution leakage and contributes to the decoding performance degradation. Since the host signal and the decoder structure information are available at the encoder side, the proposed IMSS scheme exploits both the correlation between the host signal and the watermark signal and the decoder structure in embedding the bit information to reduce the host interference effect. We can show that, compared with MSS, the proposed IMSS maintains the simple decoder structure and does not require additional information for decoding. We also analyze the decoding performances of MSS and IMSS in the presence of additional Gaussian noise. Simulation and real image results illustrate the superiority of the proposed IMSS data hiding scheme over the conventional MSS scheme.