Fuzzy proximity-based robust data hiding scheme with interval threshold

Secret communication of sensitive data must progress in a trustworthy environment through data hiding. Using Mamdani fuzzy logic to identify color proximity at the block level and a shared secret key and post-processing system, this paper attempts to develop a robust data hiding scheme with similarity measures to ensure good visual quality, robustness, imperceptibility and enhance the security. In accordance with the Gestalt principle, proximity among the nearby objects is higher, whose value varies from expert to expert. Therefore, a possibility for type-I fuzzy logic to be used to evaluate proximity. Fuzzy proximity is computed by means of a difference in intensity (colordiff) and distance (closeness). Further, the block color proximity obtained from the proximity calculation network is graded using an interval threshold. Accordingly, data embedding is processed in the sequence generated by the shared secret keys. The tampering coincidence problem is solved through a post-processing approach to increase the quality and accuracy of the recovered secret message. The experimental analysis, steganalysis and comparisons clearly illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme in terms of visual quality, structural similarity, recoverability and robustness.