Competitively coupled maps for hiding secret visual information

A novel digital image hiding scheme based on competitively coupled maps is presented in this paper. Self-organizing patterns produced by an array of non-diffusively coupled nonlinear maps are exploited to conceal the secret. The secret image is represented in the form of a dot-skeleton representation and is embedded into a spatially homogeneous initial state far below the noise level. Self-organizing patterns leak the secret image at a predefined set of system parameters. Computational experiments are used to demonstrate the effectiveness and the security of the proposed image hiding scheme.