Information hiding using approximate POSIT representation

Abstract POSIT is a numerical system consists of sign, regime, exponential, and fraction bits to overcome some limitations of the IEEE‐754 floating point (FP) representation. This work proposes a technique to hide critical information in the least significant bits (LSBs) of the POSIT FP representation by exploiting approximate computing (AC). The proposed technique, called information hiding using POSIT and LSB (IHUPL), explores the opportunities offered by both the POSIT representation and the AC to hide information with a minimum loss in accuracy and other performance metrics. IHUPL offers two options for hiding information: either by embedding one digit of each character into each pixel or by embedding all the digits of the character at the same time into each pixel of the alpha‐red, green, blue, or black/white image. Experimental results are evaluated for benchmark images and showed that IHUPL enhanced the accuracy of embedding data into LSB of POSIT FP by an average of 5%, the image quality improvement rates of IHUPL are 19% and 16% for options 1 and 2, respectively. Besides the encoding method using IHUPL, the paper outlines an extraction decoding technique that saves the original replacement bits in a key‐image to recover the hidden security message.