关键词: 信息隐藏, 伪随机掩蔽, 秘密通信, 扩频隐藏, 信干噪比

Abstract: Data hiding has attracted increasing attention as an important research field in information security. Conventional additive spreadspectrum (SS) data embedding has a dangerous security flaw that unauthorized receivers can blindly extract hidden information without the knowledge of carrier. In this paper, pseudonoise (PN) masking technique is adopted as an efficient security measure against illegitimate data extraction. The proposed PNsequence masked SS embedding can offer efficient security against current SS embedding analysis without introducing any additional distortion to host nor notable recovery performance loss. To further improve the recovery performance, optimal carrier design for PNmasked SS embedding is also developed. With any given host distortion budget, we aim at designing a carrier to maximize the output signaltointerferenceplusnoise ratio (SINR) of the corresponding maximumSINR linear filter. The extensive experimental studies confirm our analytical performance predictions, illustrate the benefits of the designed PN masked optimal SS embedding and verify the resistance of this spreadspectrum information hiding against blind detection.

Key words: information hiding, pseudonoise masking, covert communications, spreadspectrum embedding, SINR