Image hiding based on intensity quantization using genetic algorithm

This paper proposes an image hiding method based on intensity quantization which is optimized by genetic algorithm. According to the quantization parameters from genetic optimization, the secret image is transformed from 256-grayscale into 16-grayscale, and scrambled based on blocks before embedding into the host image in space domain. Simulation is realized on Matlab, and the hiding performance is compared with the result using uniform quantization, which shows that the algorithm based on genetic optimization can achieve better hiding performance.