| Summary: | When imperceptibility is an issue, data-hiding techniques typically become limited to small payloads. In this paper, a novel data-hiding scheme is proposed that allows embedding large payloads while maintaining high stego-image quality. The scheme utilizes an <inline-formula><math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"><semantics><mrow><mi>N</mi><mo>×</mo><mi>N</mi></mrow></semantics></math></inline-formula> sub-block for constructing a reference matrix as a secret key that allows the symmetric embedding and extraction of secret data from a grayscale cover image, where <inline-formula><math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"><semantics><mi>N</mi></semantics></math></inline-formula> is a positive integer greater than or equal to two. With proper modification, the proposed method can be directly converted to a symmetric cryptosystem. For cases with acceptable stego-image quality (i.e., PSNR > 34), the experimental results showed that the proposed method can embed, on average, four bits per pixel (bpp), a higher hiding capacity than in previous works, and also offers the ability to adjust the capacity by varying <inline-formula><math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"><semantics><mi>N</mi></semantics></math></inline-formula>. The number of solutions for a sub-block reaches the factorial of <inline-formula><math xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"><semantics><mrow><msup><mi>N</mi><mn>2</mn></msup></mrow></semantics></math></inline-formula>, guaranteeing the security of data embedding and extraction. In addition, the proposed method has low computational complexity and can be implemented in a straightforward manner.
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