An efficient distortion cost function design for image steganography in spatial domain using quaternion representation

Qingliang Liu, Wenkang Su, Jiangqun Ni, Xianglei Hu, Jiwu Huang

Abstract: Highlights•Define Quaternion Magnitude/Phase-based Distortion (QMD/QPD).•Propose a novel cost function QMP based on the Hadamard product of QMD and QPD.•Generalize QMP (GQMP) to exponential form to boost the security performance.•Demonstrate superior security performance than the current SOTA approaches.