Method and apparatus for generating a cover image for steganography

An apparatus for generating a cover image for hiding a secret message, the apparatus comprising:

• a memory device;
• and
• at least one microprocessor processor coupled to the memory and configured to:
• encode, by a transmitter device, the secret message to obtain a binary sequence;
• obtain, by the transmitter device, a plurality of binary segments of a particular length based on the binary sequence;
• for each binary segment of the plurality of binary segments, select, by the transmitter device, a digit image of a semantic content from a dictionary of images of random semantic contents based on the binary segment;
• combine, by the transmitter device, the selected images to form at least a portion of the cover image denoting a combination of the semantic contents of the selected images to create a stego-cover and transmit the stego-cover to a receiver device over a communication network;
• initiate, by the receiver device, a decoding procedure by searching a right digit in a permuted dictionary of images by duplicating the permutation with a specified key to obtain the right order of images in the dictionary;
• and
• for each digit image separated from the stego-cover, calculate, by the receiver device, a distance between the digit image and each image in the dictionary, wherein the receiver device concatenates all the binary segments to obtain the right binary sequence in order to recover the secret message by looking up an ASCII table.

A non-transitory computer-readable medium storing computer executable code, comprising instructions for:

• encoding, by a transmitter device, a secret message to obtain a binary sequence;
• obtaining, by the transmitter device, a plurality of binary segments of a particular length based on the binary sequence;
• for each binary segment of the plurality of binary segments, selecting, by the transmitter device, a digit image of a semantic content from a dictionary of images of random semantic contents based on the binary segment;
• combining, by the transmitter device, the selected images to form at least a portion of a cover image denoting a combination of the semantic contents of the selected images to create a stego-cover and transmitting the stego-cover to a receiver device over a communication network;
• initiating, by the receiver device, a decoding procedure by searching a right digit in a permuted dictionary of images by duplicating the permutation with a specified key to obtain the right order of images in the dictionary;
• and
• for each digit image separated from the stego-cover, calculating, by the receiver device, a distance between the digit image and each image in the dictionary, wherein the receiver device concatenates all the binary segments to obtain the right binary sequence in order to recover the secret message by looking up an ASCII table.