Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
Arabian Journal for Science and Engineering, 2025 (SCI-Expanded, Scopus)
The rise in image content sharing over open networks has intensified the need for image protection. While encryption is prevalent, image hiding offers an extra layer of security by hiding secret images within cover images, making it challenging for interceptors to notice the hidden content. Most existing methods embed a single secret image into a single cover image, while some can hide multiple secret images within one cover image. However, these approaches still pose security risks, as intercepting one stego image may reveal all of the hidden content. A more secure approach involves distributing secret images across multiple cover images, requiring an attacker to acquire all or most of them to reconstruct the secret images. To address this issue, this study proposes a multi-image hiding technique that distributes multiple secret images across multiple cover images. Additionally, the proposed method employs an optimization algorithm to determine the most suitable positions for hiding secret images within the cover images. This strategy ensures that any repeating or overlapping areas in the cover images are taken into account during the hiding process. Experimental results indicate that the proposed method reached a Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio of 45.8596 dB using the Artificial Bee Colony algorithm. Furthermore, multiple secret images hidden within multiple cover images are extracted from stego images without any loss.