Information hiding allows us to hide secret information into digital objects such as images without significantly distorting the objects. The object containing hidden information will be transmitted to a data receiver via a probably insecure channel. To securely transmit the object carrying hidden information, the distortion caused by data embedding should be as low as possible, which is referred to as the rate-distortion optimization problem. Many conventional methods optimize the data embedding procedure by a heuristic fashion, which may be not optimal in terms of the rate-distortion performance. In this chapter, we introduce novel approaches that use graph theory for information hiding. These graph models are general and can be used for improving the rate-distortion performance of information hiding systems. In addition to rate-distortion optimization, recent graph models used for system design of information hiding will be also reviewed. This chapter is intended as a tutorial introducing advanced graph models applied to information hiding.
Part of the book: Recent Applications in Graph Theory