Line-Based Cubism-Like Image—A New Type of Art Image and its Application to Lossless Data Hiding

A new method of combining art image generation and data hiding to enhance the camouflage effect for various information-hiding applications is proposed. First, a new type of computer art, called line-based Cubism-like image, which keeps a characteristic of the Cubism art-abstraction by prominent lines and regions from multiple viewpoints-is proposed. In the creation process with an input source image, prominent line segments in the image are detected and rearranged to form an abstract region-type art image of the Cubism flavor. Data hiding with the minimal distortion is carried out skillfully during the process of recoloring the regions in the generated art image by shifting the pixels´ colors for the minimum amount of ±1 while keeping the average colors of the regions unchanged. Based on a rounding-off property in integer-valued color computation, the proposed data hiding technique is proved by theorems to be reversible, and thus useful for lossless recovery of the cover art image from the stego-image. Four security enhancement measures are also adopted to prevent hackers from extracting embedded data correctly. Experimental results show the feasibility of the proposed method.