Stone Painting Generative Information Hiding Method Through Triangulation and Bezier Curves

Unlike natural carrier-based coverless information hiding, non-natural carrier-based coverless information hiding does not attempt to generate or utilize natural carriers to hide secret information, which can fundamentally avoid the discrimination problem of natural carriers. However, in existing non-natural-based coverless information hiding methods, marbling painting based information hiding cannot conceal secret bits effectively, whereas fractal-based information hiding requires strict mathematical constraints on global and local self-similarities. To effectively conceal secret information and further improve visual quality by employing natural image vectorization, this paper proposes a stone painting generative information hiding method through triangulation and Bezier curves. First, the foreground region of a cover image is triangulated by removing triangles that are unsuitable for embedding and do not preserve foreground characteristics. Second, stone contours that represent the secret bits and are tangential to the given triangular region are generated, and random colors consistent with the triangular region, user key, and embedded secret bits are filled in to generate the stone painting. Finally, the secret bits are extracted, and color authentication is performed based on the consistent triangular region generated by the key. Theoretical and experimental results confirm that the proposed method can generate stone paintings with semantically rich features consistent with the contours of the cover image. It effectively conceals secret bits without exposing the embedded features, and the extraction relies strictly on the user key, thereby allowing high-precision color authentication. Without the correct key, the secret bits cannot be obtained.