Infrared and Laser Engineering, Volume. 54, Issue 8, 20250001(2025)

Multifunctional integral imaging steganography toward battlefield situation awareness

Yang YANG1, Gaoyong LU1, Hongran ZENG2, and Xiaowei LI2、*
Author Affiliations
  • 1Southwest China Institute of Electronic Technology, China Electronics Technology Group Corporation, Chengdu 610036, China
  • 2School of Electronics and Information Engineering, Sichuan University, Chengdu 610065, China
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    ObjectiveIntegral imaging, compared to other naked-eye 3D imaging techniques, offers significant advantages such as full parallax, true color, pseudo-continuous light field display, lightweight design, and cost efficiency. However, with the growing adoption of integral imaging in applications like remote healthcare, education, and data visualization, the security of 3D light field data during transmission and storage has become a pressing concern, as unauthorized tampering or leakage could lead to privacy breaches or economic losses. Existing steganographic methods for integral imaging primarily focus on robust watermarking for image sourcing, lacking functionalities for authenticity verification and tampering detection. This research aims to fill this gap by introducing a tampering detection approach that not only ensures the integrity of received images but also supports accurate decision-making based on the embedded content. Successfully implementing this technique will enhance the security and reliability of integral imaging applications, fostering broader adoption across critical fields, such as battlefield situation awareness, remote healthcare, and intelligent education. For this purpose, a multifunctional three-dimensional optical information hiding technology based on integral imaging and light field saliency is designed in this paper.MethodsSteganography with different modalities and functionalities was performed on integral imaging in this paper. The algorithm implements three functions based on the significance of different regions of the 3D light field, providing a foundational reference framework for multilayer steganographic techniques targeting naked-eye 3D images. By combining elemental image sequences and neural networks, the algorithm achieved pixelwise extraction of regions of interest (ROI) and regions of non-interest (RONI) for light field 3D objects, significantly improving the precision of saliency extraction in 3D space (Fig.2, Fig.6). For the irregular spatial distribution of ROIs in light field 3D objects, a histogram-based fragile steganography algorithm instead of those based on two-dimension energy concentration was proposed, which defines embedding strength according to varying saliency levels within the ROI to balance invisibility and watermark sensitivity (Fig.3, Fig.9). Additionally, multi-logo fused multi-depth light field images were used as robust watermarks for RONI steganography, enhancing the robustness of the watermark under various attacks and its concealment within the host (Fig.10).Results and DiscussionsExperimental results show that the structural similarity index (SSIM) of the embedded ROI and RONI averages above 0.99 (Fig.7-Fig.8), with the ROI achieving a tampering character error rate exceeding 96% under six attacks (Fig.9), and the robust watermarks extracted in the RONI achieving an average SSIM of 0.7 compared to the original watermark (Fig.10). The results demonstrate that the proposed multifunctional three-dimensional optical information hiding technique achieves desirable invisibility, sensitivity, and robustness.ConclusionsThis study proposes a multifunctional three-dimensional optical information hiding technique for integral imaging, leveraging its spatial and angular characteristics in combination with light field saliency extraction. First, the method integrates elemental image sequence with neural networks to extract 3D ROI and RONI characterized by multi-depth and continuous viewpoint transformation features. Then, a saliency histogram of the ROI is utilized to embed textual data as fragile watermarks in a pseudo-continuous manner. Multiple logo patterns are fused into multi-depth virtual light fields to construct multi-logo-multi-depth-watermark, embedded into the RONI. This approach enables users to verify whether the image has been tampered with based on the embedded textual data and interpret the naked-eye 3D image more accurately using the embedded reports. Additionally, robust watermarks embedded across multiple depths ensure image sourcing of the 3D light field image. Experimental results show that this approach offers high invisibility and both authenticity and integrity of information, paving a way for omnidirectional and multi-insurance steganography for 3D light field imaging.

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    Yang YANG, Gaoyong LU, Hongran ZENG, Xiaowei LI. Multifunctional integral imaging steganography toward battlefield situation awareness[J]. Infrared and Laser Engineering, 2025, 54(8): 20250001

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    Paper Information

    Category: Optical imaging, display and information processing

    Received: Jan. 2, 2025

    Accepted: --

    Published Online: Aug. 29, 2025

    The Author Email:

    DOI:10.3788/IRLA20250001

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