Abstract Information hiding is a technology aimed at the secure hiding of important information into digital documents or media. In this paper, a new approach is proposed for the secure hiding of information into gray scale images. The hiding is performed in two stages. In the first stage, the binary bits in the sequence of information are shuffled and encoded with a set of integer keys and a system of one-dimensional logistic mappings. In the second stage, the resulting sequence is embedded into the gray values of selected pixels in the given image. A dynamic programming method is utilized to select the pixels that minimize the difference between a cover image and the corresponding stego image. Experiments show that this approach outperforms other information hiding methods by 13.1% in Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR) on average and reduces the difference between a stego image and its cover image to 0 in some cases.

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[29] Zhu S. and Zhu C., “Image Encryption Algorithm with an Avalanche Effect Based on A Six- Dimensional Discrete Chaotic System,” Multimedia Tools and Applications, vol. 77, pp. 29119-29142, 2018. Yinglei Song received his Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Georgia, USA in 2006. He worked as an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Maryland Eastern Shore, USA from 2007 to 2012. He is currently with the School of Electronics and Information Science at Jiangsu University of Science and Technology, China. His research interests include information hiding, algorithms for image processing, machine learning, bioinformatics and data mining. Jia Song received her Ph.D. in computer science from Zhejiang University, China in 2014. She is currently with the Department of Electronic and Information Technology, Suzhou Vocational University, China. Her research interests include information hiding, chaotic systems, operating systems, bioinformatics algorithm design. Junfeng Qu received his Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Georgia, USA in 2006 and joined the Department of Information Technology and Computer Science at Clayton State University as an assistant professor in that year. He is currently with the Department of Computer Science and Information Technology at the Clayton State University, USA. His research interests include information hiding, image processing, machine learning and bioinformatics.