Interpolation-Based High Capacity Quantum Image Steganography

Encryption and information hiding are widely used in security applications requiring copyright protection, over-communication, and tamper detection. Quantum steganography, using quantum images and audio as information carriers, is a fascinating hybrid of classical and quantum informatics. While existing steganography techniques offer high invisibility, current embedding capacities remain insufficient. As such, a high capacity quantum steganography algorithm, based on image interpolation, is proposed in this study. In this approach, quantum interpolation is conducted by maximizing difference values between neighboring pixels to generate a cover image. Secret message embedding and extraction steps are then developed for the resulting quantum images, in addition to corresponding quantum circuit networks. A series of simulation experiments were conducted to demonstrate the implementation and assess the performance of the proposed technique, the efficiency of which was evaluated using several performance metrics and the visual quality of the stego-images. The resulting information capacity was much higher than that of existing quantum steganography algorithms. This suggests the proposed strategy to be a promising trade-off between invisibility and capacity, providing new motivation to investigate image steganography using quantum computing resources.