{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2025,11,2]],"date-time":"2025-11-02T04:42:40Z","timestamp":1762058560316,"version":"build-2065373602"},"reference-count":31,"publisher":"MDPI AG","issue":"7","license":[{"start":{"date-parts":[[2022,7,15]],"date-time":"2022-07-15T00:00:00Z","timestamp":1657843200000},"content-version":"vor","delay-in-days":0,"URL":"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by\/4.0\/"}],"funder":[{"name":"Minister of Science and Technology","award":["Taiwan MOST 109-2218- E-002-015"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["Taiwan MOST 109-2218- E-002-015"]}]},{"name":"National Center for High-performance Computing","award":["Taiwan MOST 109-2218- E-002-015"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["Taiwan MOST 109-2218- E-002-015"]}]}],"content-domain":{"domain":[],"crossmark-restriction":false},"short-container-title":["Entropy"],"abstract":"<jats:p>Steganography is one of the most crucial methods for information hiding, which embeds secret data on an ordinary file or a cover message for avoiding detection. We designed a novel rate-distortion-based large-capacity secure steganographic system, called rate-distortion-based Stego (RD-Stego), to effectively solve the above requirement. The considered effectiveness of our system design includes embedding capacity, adaptability to chosen cover attacks, and the stability of the trained model. The proposed stego scheme can hide multiple three-channel color images and QR codes within another three-channel color image with low visual distortion. Empirically, with a certain degree of robustness against the chosen cover attack, we state that the system offers up to 192+ bits-per-pixel (bpp) embedding of a payload and leaks no secret-related information. Moreover, to provide theoretical foundations for our cost function design, a mutual information-based explanation of the choices of regulation processes is herein included. Finally, we justify our system\u2019s claimed advantages through a series of experiments with publicly available benchmark datasets.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.3390\/e24070982","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2022,7,17]],"date-time":"2022-07-17T21:00:28Z","timestamp":1658091628000},"page":"982","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.3390\/mdpi_crossmark_policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":3,"title":["Rate-Distortion-Based Stego: A Large-Capacity Secure Steganography Scheme for Hiding Digital Images"],"prefix":"10.3390","volume":"24","author":[{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-6493-7607","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Yi-Lun","family":"Pan","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Taiwan University, Taipei 10617, Taiwan"},{"name":"National Center for High-Performance Computing, Hsinchu 30076, Taiwan"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-3631-1551","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Ja-Ling","family":"Wu","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Taiwan University, Taipei 10617, Taiwan"},{"name":"Graduate Institute of Networking and Multimedia, National Taiwan University, Taipei 10617, Taiwan"}]}],"member":"1968","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2022,7,15]]},"reference":[{"key":"ref_1","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"1062","DOI":"10.1109\/5.771065","article-title":"Information Hiding-A Survey","volume":"87","author":"Petitcolas","year":"1999","journal-title":"Proc. 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