*Article* **Information Hiding Based on Two-Level Mechanism and Look-Up Table Approach**

**Jeng-Shyang Pan 1, Xiao-Xue Sun 1, Hongmei Yang 1, Václav Snášel 2 and Shu-Chuan Chu 1,\***


**Abstract:** Information hiding can be seen everywhere in our daily life, and this technology improves the security of information. The requirements for information security are becoming higher and higher. The coverless information hiding with the help of mapping relationship has high capacity, but there is still a problem in which the secret message cannot find the mapping relationship and the process requires extra storage burden during the transmission. Therefore, on the basis of symmetric reversible watermarking, the paper introduces the two-level mechanism and novel arrangements to solve the problem of sufficient diversity of features and has better capacity and image quality as a whole. Besides, for the security of secret message, this paper designs a new encryption model based on Logistic mapping. This method only employs coverless information hiding of one carrier image to transmit secret message with the help of the two-level mechanism and look-up table. Reversible information hiding is applied to embed the generated location table on the original image so that ensures storage and security. The experiment certifies that the diversity of hash code is increased by using the two-level image mechanism and the quality of the image is excellent, which proves the advantages of the proposed symmetric method over the previous algorithm.

**Keywords:** logistic mapping; two-level mechanism; look-up table; reversible information hiding
