Abstract
Steganography in the spatial domain generally faces the challenge of having high capacity, high fidelity and high security. This study presents a channel-agnostic adaptive solution to address the issues of spatial desynchronization and to also increase the cryptographic complexity. This method is based on the use of a 4D fractional order hyper-chaotic system to create the scattered embedding coordinates with initial conditions, fractional orders and continuous coefficients as the three active keys. At the same time, a structural map is being generated which is invariant under MSB and which determines the local capacity.
This system separates the concept of capacity estimation from LSB modifications, and dynamically allocates 1-bit payloads to smooth regions and 3 bits to structural boundaries. Under noise free conditions, experimental results are conducted on grayscale and RGB images which shows the exact secret recovery (MSE=0). The method can be used to obtain the highest payload gain of 9.65% relative to the standard 1-bit baselines with Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratios (PSNR) > 50 dB and Structural Similarity (SSIM) > 0.999. The non-local memory of the fractional dynamics is an expansion of the theoretical key space around 598 bits, enhancing exhaustive parameter search ability. Finally, the framework mathematically separates the scattering of capacity from the embedding of data so that a good tradeoff between scattering security and high-fidelity adaptive embedding is obtained.
Keywords
Fractional-Order Calculus Hyper-Chaotic Systems Adaptive Steganography Pseudo-Random Scattering Key Sensitivity MSB-Invariant Edge Map Blind Extraction Dimension-Agnostic ProcessingReferences
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