The use of spread spectrum to improve information hiding in images

Information hiding of text in cover images is an effective research area. It simply relies on the fact that the hiding process is kept secret. This paper is concerned with the text in image hiding. The proposed hiding system uses spread spectrum technique together with error correction coding. These are used to increase the security of the system and the reliability of the recovery at the receiver side. Random location selection within the cover image pixels is also proposed in the work. Improvement has been achieved in reliability on the expense of reduced hiding capacity. The imperceptibility of the stego image is assessed by using peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) measure. Attacks in the form of lossy compression and additive noise introduced during signal transmission are considered. The results have shown that the performance of the proposed system provides good immunity to both noise and compression attacks.