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On the Efficiency of Combinatorial Generation for Adaptive Image Steganography
The widespread use of remote communication technologies in various fields leads to new tasks of information security. Steganographic embedding is an effective method of protecting information transmitted over an open communication channel. Steganography techniques hide information in digital objects by embedding, making it invisible to an attacker. The most common covers for hiding additional information are multimedia data, in particular digital images. The embedding effectiveness is mainly assessed by the criteria of invisibility and capacity. One of the ways to improve the embedding efficiency is to choose the best location of message bits within the cover object, but it usually takes a long time to iterate through a large number of such embedding options. In this paper, we propose a new approach to finding the best option for steganographic embedding of information into the phase spectrum of the discrete Fourier transform based on the methods of combinatorial generation. The results of the experiments show that the new approach allows us to reduce the best embedding option search time, while the invisibility and capacity indicators remain high.