Ahmad Tohari, Amrizal Muhammad Hanif, Wibisono Waskitho, Ijtihadie Royyana Muslim
Department of Informatics, Institut Teknologi Sepuluh Nopember, Surabaya, 60111, Indonesia.
Heliyon. 2020 Mar 2;6(3):e03464. doi: 10.1016/j.heliyon.2020.e03464. eCollection 2020 Mar.
In this digital era, transmitting data through a computer network has become common. Moreover, some applications have also been developed to do it. Nevertheless, users may not be aware of the security aspect of this data transmission, which can lead to disclosing this private message. In a case when a sensitive message is the object to transmit, a security mechanism should be applied. Data hiding is one of the methods introduced to work for this issue. In this algorithm, the message is embedded into the cover, such as an audio file, before being transmitted; on the other side, the recipient extracts it. However, the size of the message and the quality of the resulted stego data are still challenging. In this paper, we focus on these two problems by considering some factors: embedding space, embedding process, reducing, and smoothing steps. Firstly, the audio signal is discretized to obtain audio samples. Next, these samples are interpolated to provide spaces for hiding the secret. Considering that the quality of the generated stego audio is likely to drop, reducing and smoothing steps are designed. The experimental results show that this approach can improve the quality of the stego based on the specified payload capacity. That is, there is an increase in PSNR value of at least 10 dB, depending on the payload size and the methods.
在这个数字时代，通过计算机网络传输数据已变得很常见。此外，还开发了一些应用程序来进行数据传输。然而，用户可能并未意识到这种数据传输的安全问题，这可能导致私人信息泄露。当敏感信息成为传输对象时，应应用一种安全机制。数据隐藏是为解决此问题而引入的方法之一。在该算法中，消息在传输前被嵌入到载体中，如音频文件；在另一端，接收者提取它。然而，消息的大小和所得隐秘数据的质量仍然具有挑战性。在本文中，我们通过考虑一些因素来关注这两个问题：嵌入空间、嵌入过程、降噪和平滑步骤。首先，对音频信号进行离散化以获得音频样本。接下来，对这些样本进行插值以提供隐藏秘密的空间。考虑到生成的隐秘音频质量可能会下降，设计了降噪和平滑步骤。实验结果表明，基于指定的有效载荷容量，这种方法可以提高隐秘音频的质量。也就是说，根据有效载荷大小和方法的不同，峰值信噪比（PSNR）值至少会增加10 dB。
