Battiato, S.Blasi, G. DiGallo, G.Patti, S.Raffaele De Amicis and Giuseppe Conti2014-01-272014-01-272007978-3905673-62-3https://doi.org/10.2312/LocalChapterEvents/ItalChap/ItalianChapConf2007/059-064Steganography is the art of "secret communication". Its goal is to transmit a message (information) hidden inside another visible message. The typical visible message used in many steganographic systems is a digital image and the embedded message is usually hidden by working in the Fourier domain. In this paper we present Ramses, a novel approach to the steganography based on the Puzzle Image Mosaic (PIM) technique ( [DGP05]) which uses the metaphor of the hieroglyphicwriting to hide the message in the image. Themessage is first coded by a sequence of small irregular images and then merged inside another image together with many other small images.We prove that the Kerckhoff's principle required by a steganographic technique is satisfied and experimental results show how it is very difficult to detect the hidden message.Categories and SubjectDescriptors (according to ACM CCS): I.3.3 [Computer Graphics]: Picture/Image Generation E.3 [Data Encryption]: Public key cryptosystems