An invisible hybrid color image system using spread vector quantization neural networks with penalized FCM

In this paper, an invisible hybrid color image hiding scheme based on spread vector quantization (VQ) neural network with penalized fuzzy c-means (PFCM) clustering technology (named SPFNN) is proposed. The goal is to offer safe exchange of a color stego-image in the internet. In the proposed scheme, the secret color image is first compressed by a spread-unsupervised neural network with PFCM based on interpolative VQ (IVQ), then the block cipher Data Encryption Standard (DES) and the Rivest, Shamir and Adleman (RSA) algorithms are hired to provide the mechanism of a hybrid cryptosystem for secure communication and convenient environment in the internet. In the SPFNN, the penalized fuzzy clustering technology is embedded in a two-dimensional Hopfield neural network in order to generate optimal solutions for IVQ. Then we encrypted color IVQ indices and sorted the codebooks of secret color image information and embedded them into the frequency domain of the cover color image by the Hadamard transform (HT). Our proposed method has two benefits comparing with other data hiding techniques. One is the high security and convenience offered by the hybrid DES and RSA cryptosystems to exchange color image data in the internet. The other benefit is that excellent results can be obtained using our proposed color image compression scheme SPFNN method. 2006 Pattern Recognition Society. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.