Halftone Pattern: A New Steganographic Approach

Abstract

In general, an image is worth a thousand words, but sometimes, words are the most efficient tool to communicate some information. Thereupon, in this work, we will present an approach for combining the visual appeal of images with the communication power of words. Our method is a steganographic technique to hide a textual information into an image. It is inspired by the use of dithering to create halftone images. It begins from a base image and creates the coded image by associating each base image pixel to a set of two-colors pixels (halftone) forming an appropriate pattern. The coded image is a machine readable information, with good aesthetic, secure and containing data redundancy and compression. Thus, it can be used in a variety of applications.