Improved multiplicative spread spectrum embedding for image data hiding

In this paper, we propose an improved multiplicative spread spectrum (IMSS) embedding scheme for data hiding by exploiting the multiplicative characteristic to maintain the attractive property of having good quality in IMSS and reducing the interference effect of the host signal in the original multiplicative spread spectrum (MSS) embedding to improve the decoding performance. We first derive the optimal decoder for MSS. We then propose the IMSS approach by exploring the decoder structure of MSS to remove the interference effect of the host signal as much as possible, and derive the optimal decoder for IMSS which remains the simple structure as in MSS and does not require additional information at the receiver side. Simulation results clearly demonstrate the superiority of the proposed IMSS scheme over the MSS one.