Image steganography is the art of hiding secret message in grayscale or color images. Easy detection of secret message for any state-of-art image steganography can break the stego system. To prevent the breakdown of the stego system data is embedded in the selected area of an image which reduces the probability of detection. Most of the existing adaptive image steganography techniques achieve low embedding capacity. In this paper a high capacity Predictive Edge Adaptive image steganography technique is proposed where selective area of cover image is predicted using Modified Median Edge Detector (MMED) predictor to embed the binary payload (data). The cover image used to embed the payload is a grayscale image. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme achieves better embedding capacity with minimum level of distortion and higher level of security. The proposed scheme is compared with the existing image steganography schemes. Results show that the proposed scheme achieves better embedding rate with lower level of distortion.
In recent years, due to the powerful abilities to deal with highly complex tasks, the artificial neural networks (ANNs) have been studied in the hope of achieving human-like performance in many applications. Since the ANNs have the ability to approximate complex functions from observations, it is straightforward to consider the ANNs for steganography. In this paper, we aim to implement the well-known LSB substitution and matrix coding steganography with the feed-forward neural networks (FNNs). Our experimental results have shown that, the used FNNs can achieve the data embedding operation of t…
The art of information hiding has been around nearly as long as the need for covert communication. Steganography, the concealing of information, arose early on as an extremely useful method for covert information transmission. Steganography is the art of hiding secret message within a larger image or message such that the hidden message or an image is undetectable; this is in contrast to cryptography, where the existence of the message itself is not disguised, but the content is obscure. The goal of a steganographic method is to minimize the visually apparent and statistical differences betwee…
The demand for keeping the information secure and confidential simultaneously has been progressively increasing. Among various techniques- Audio Steganography, a technique of embedding information transparently in a digital media thereby restricting the access to such information has been prominently developed. Imperceptibility, robustness, and payload or hiding capacity are the main character for it. In earlier, LSB techniques increased payload capacity would hamper robustness as well as imperceptibility of the cover media and vice versa. The proposed technique overcomes the problem. It provi…
Steganalysis tools play an important part in saving time and providing new angles of attack for forensic analysts. StegExpose is a solution designed for use in the real world, and is able to analyse images for LSB steganography in bulk using proven attacks in a time efficient manner. When steganalytic methods are combined intelligently, they are able generate even more accurate results. This is the prime focus of StegExpose.
This paper presents a novel 2-3-3 LSB insertion method. The image steganography takes the advantage of human eye limitation. It uses color image as cover media for embedding secret message.The important quality of a steganographic system is to be less distortive while increasing the size of the secret message. In this paper a method is proposed to embed a color secret image into a color cover image. A 2-3-3 LSB insertion method has been used for image steganography. Experimental results show an improvement in the Mean squared error (MSE) and Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR) values of the prop…
Digitization of image was a revolutionary step for the fields of photography and Image processing as this made the editing of images much effortless and easier. Image editing was not an issue until it was limited to corrective editing procedures used to enhance the quality of an image such as, contrast stretching, noise filtering, sharpening etc. But, it became a headache for many fields when image editing became manipulative. Digital images have become an easier source of tampering and forgery during last few decades. Today users and editing specialists, equipped with easily available image e…
The importance of data hiding in the field of Information Technology is a widely accepted. The challenge is to be able to pass information in a manner that the very existence of the message is unknown in order to repel attention of the potential attacker. Steganography is a technique that has been widely used to achieve this objective. However Steganography is often found to be lacking when it comes to hiding bulk data. Attempting to hide data in a video overcomes this problem because of the large sized cover object (video) as compared to an image in the case of steganography. This paper attem…
This paper presents a novel method for detection of LSB matching steganogra- phy in grayscale images. This method is based on the analysis of the differences between neighboring pixels before and after random data embedding. In natu- ral images, there is a strong correlation between adjacent pixels. This correla- tion is disturbed by LSB matching generating new types of correlations. The pre- sented method generates patterns from these correlations and analyzes their varia- tion when random data are hidden. The experiments performed for two different image databases show that the method yields…
In order to improve the data hiding in all types of multimedia data formats such as image and audio and to make hidden message imperceptible, a novel method for steganography is introduced in this paper. It is based on Least Significant Bit (LSB) manipulation and inclusion of redundant noise as secret key in the message. This method is applied to data hiding in images. For data hiding in audio, Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) and Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) both are used. All the results displayed prove to be time-efficient and effective. Also the algorithm is tested for various numbers o…
Steganalysis means analysis of stego images. Like cryptanalysis, steganalysis is used to detect messages often encrypted using secret key from stego images produced by steganography techniques. Recently lots of new and improved steganography techniques are developed and proposed by researchers which require robust steganalysis techniques to detect the stego images having minimum false alarm rate. This paper discusses about the different Steganalysis techniques and help to understand how, where and when this techniques can be used based on different situations.
Sterilization is a very popular word used in biomedical testing (like removal of all microorganisms on surface of an article or in fluid using appropriate chemical products). Motivated by this biological analogy, we, for the first time, introduce the concept of sterilization of an image, i.e., removing any steganographic information embedded in the image. Experimental results show that our technique succeeded in sterilizing around 76% to 91% of stego pixels in an image on average, where data is embedded using LSB-based steganography.
In recent years, steganography has emerged as one of the main research areas in information security. Least significant bit (LSB) steganography is one of the fundamental and conventional spatial domain methods, which is capable of hiding larger secret information in a cover image without noticeable visual distortions. In this paper, a combined algorithm based on LSB steganography and chaotic encryption is proposed. Experimental results show the feasibility of the proposed method. In comparison with existing steganographic spatial domain based algorithms, the suggested algorithm is shown to hav…
Similarity measure, also called information measure, is a concept used to distinguish different objects. It has been studied from different contexts by employing mathematical, psychological, and fuzzy approaches. Image steganography is the art of hiding secret data into an image in such a way that it cannot be detected by an intruder. In image steganography, hiding secret data in the plain or non-edge regions of the image is significant due to the high similarity and redundancy of the pixels in their neighborhood. However, the similarity measure of the neighboring pixels, i.e., their proximity…
Steganography plays a vital role in achieving secret data security by embedding it into cover media. The cover media and the secret data can be text or multimedia, such as images, videos, etc. In this paper, we propose a novel $\ell_1$-minimization and sparse approximation based blind multi-image steganography scheme, termed $\ell_1$SABMIS. By using $\ell_1$SABMIS, multiple secret images can be hidden in a single cover image. In $\ell_1$SABMIS, we sampled cover image into four sub-images, sparsify each sub-image block-wise, and then obtain linear measurements. Next, we obtain DCT (Discrete Cos…
LSB steganography is a one of the most widely used methods for implementing covert data channels in image file exchanges [1][2]. The low computational complexity and implementation simplicity of the algorithm are significant factors for its popularity with the primary reason being low image distortion. Many attempts have been made to increase the embedding capacity of LSB algorithms by expanding into the second or third binary layers of the image while maintaining a low probability of detection with minimal distortive effects [2][3][4]. In this paper, we introduce an advanced technique for cov…
Digital steganography is becoming a common tool for protecting sensitive communications in various applications such as crime(terrorism) prevention whereby law enforcing personals need to remotely compare facial images captured at the scene of crime with faces databases of known criminals(suspects); exchanging military maps or surveillance video in hostile environment(situations); privacy preserving in the healthcare systems when storing or exchanging patient medical images(records); and prevent bank customers accounts(records) from being accessed illegally by unauthorized users. Existing digi…
Image Steganography is a growing research area of information security where secret information is embedded in innocent-looking public communication. This paper proposes a novel crystographic technique for grayscale images in spatial domain. The secret data is encrypted and shuffled using pattern based bits shuffling algorithm (PBSA) and a secret key. The encrypted data is then embedded in the cover image using magic least significant bit (M-LSB) method. Experimentally, the proposed method is evaluated by qualitative and quantitative analysis which validates the effectiveness of the proposed m…
A new technique for data hiding in digital image is proposed in this paper. Steganography is a well known technique for hiding data in an image, but generally the format of image plays a pivotal role in it, and the scheme is format dependent. In this paper we will discuss a new technique where irrespective of the format of image, we can easily hide a large amount of data without deteriorating the quality of the image. The data to be hidden is enciphered with the help of a secret key. This enciphered data is then embedded at the end of the image. The enciphered data bits are extracted and then …
This paper attempts to improve the quality and the modification rate of a Stego Image. The input image provided for estimating the quality of an image and the modified rate is a bitmap image. The threshold value is used as a parameter for selecting the high frequency pixels from the Cover Image. The data embedding process are performed on the pixels that are found with the help of Threshold value by using LSBMR. The quality of an image is estimated by the value of PSNR and the modification rate of an image is estimated by the value of MSE. The proposed approach achieves about 0.2 to 0.6 % of i…
Indian Institute of Information Technology, Lucknow（印度信息技术学院勒克瑙分校）；GLA University（GLA大学）
Steganography methods in general terms tend to embed more and more secret bits in the cover images. Most of these methods are designed to embed secret information in such a way that the change in the visual quality of the resulting stego image is not detectable. There exists some methods which preserve the global structure of the cover after embedding. However, the embedding capacity of these methods is very less. In this paper a novel feature based blind image steganography technique is proposed, which preserves the LBP (Local binary pattern) feature of the cover with comparable embedding rat…
Steganography involves hiding a secret message or image inside another cover image. Changes are made in the cover image without affecting visual quality of the image. In contrast to cryptography, Steganography provides complete secrecy of the communication. Security of very sensitive data can be enhanced by combining cryptography and steganography. A new technique that uses the concept of Steganography to obtain the position values from an image is suggested. This paper proposes a new method where no change is made to the cover image, only the pixel position LSB (Least Significant Bit) values …
Steganography represents the art of unobtrusively concealing a secrete message within some cover data. The key scope of this work is about visual steganography techniques that hide a full-sized color image / video within another. A majority of existing works are devoted to the image case, where both secret and cover data are images. We empirically validate that image steganography model does not naturally extend to the video case (i.e., hiding a video into another video), mainly because it completely ignores the temporal redundancy within consecutive video frames. Our work proposes a novel sol…
Information security is concerned with maintaining the secrecy, reliability and accessibility of data. The main objective of information security is to protect information and information system from unauthorized access, revelation, disruption, alteration, annihilation and use. This paper uses spatial domain LSB substitution method for information embedding and modified forms of Arnold transform are applied twice in two different phases to ensure security. The system is tested and validated against a series of standard images and the results show that the method is highly secure and provides h…
Image Steganography is a thriving research area of information security where secret data is embedded in images to hide its existence while getting the minimum possible statistical detectability. This paper proposes a novel magic least significant bit substitution method (M-LSB-SM) for RGB images. The proposed method is based on the achromatic component (I-plane) of the hue-saturation-intensity (HSI) color model and multi-level encryption (MLE) in the spatial domain. The input image is transposed and converted into an HSI color space. The I-plane is divided into four sub-images of equal size, …
...The steganography scheme makes it possible to hide the medical image in different bit locations of host media without inviting suspicion. The Secret file is embedded in a cover media with a key. At the receiving end the key can be derived by all the classes which are higher in the hierarchy using symmetric polynomial and the medical image file can be retrieved. The system is implemented and found to be secure, fast and scalable. Simulation results show that the system is dynamic in nature and allows any type of hierarchy. The proposed approach performs better even during frequent member joi…
Image steganography is art of hiding information onto the cover image. In this proposal a transformed domain based gray scale image authentication/data hiding technique using Z transform (ZT) termed as FDSZT, has been proposed. ZTransform is applied on 2x2 masks of the source image in row major order to transform original sub image (cover image) block to its corresponding frequency domain. One bit of the hidden image is embedded in each mask of the source image onto the fourth LSB of transformed coefficient based on median value of the mask. A delicate handle has also been performed as post em…
An efficient 2-step steganography technique is proposed to enhance stego image quality and secret message un-detectability. The first step is a preprocessing algorithm that reduces the size of secret images without losing information. This results in improved stego image quality compared to other existing image steganography methods. The proposed secret image size reduction (SISR) algorithm is an efficient spatial domain technique. The second step is an embedding mechanism that relies on Fibonacci representation of pixel intensities to minimize the effect of embedding on the stego image qualit…
Image Steganography is the process of embedding text in images such that its existence cannot be detected by Human Visual System (HVS) and is known only to sender and receiver. This paper presents a novel approach for image steganography using Hue-Saturation-Intensity (HSI) color space based on Least Significant Bit (LSB). The proposed method transforms the image from RGB color space to Hue-Saturation-Intensity (HSI) color space and then embeds secret data inside the Intensity Plane (I-Plane) and transforms it back to RGB color model after embedding. The said technique is evaluated by both sub…
This paper proposes an improved steganography approach for hiding text messages in lossless RGB images. The objective of this work is to increase the security level and to improve the storage capacity with compression techniques. The security level is increased by randomly distributing the text message over the entire image instead of clustering within specific image portions. Storage capacity is increased by utilizing all the color channels for storing information and providing the source text message compression. The degradation of the images can be minimized by changing only one least signi…
The capacity and security of the confidential message on the channel are two important challenges in steganography. In this paper, a new block steganography model is presented using the bargain method so that a competitive model is introduced. In this game, the blocks are the same players. The bargain is provided with the aim of embedding information without reducing capacity as well as increasing security. The proposed model shows that it can be used both of the special domain and the transform domain, which are two important methods of steganography. For this purpose, an example of a special…
Steganography is an information hiding technique in which secret data are secured by covering them into a computer carrier file without damaging the file or changing its size. The difference between steganography and cryptography is that steganography is a stealthy method of communication that only the communicating parties are aware of; while, cryptography is an overt method of communication that anyone is aware of, despite its payload is scribbled. Typically, an irrecoverable steganography algorithm is the algorithm that makes it hard for malicious third parties to discover how it works and …
LSB method is one of the well-known steganography methods which hides the message bits into the least significant bit of pixel values. This method changes the statistical information of images, which causes to have an unsecured channel. To increase the security of this method against the steganalysis methods, in this paper an adaptive method for hiding data into images will be proposed. So, the amount of data and the method which is used for hiding data in each area of image will be different. Experimental results show that the security of the proposed method is higher than general LSB method …
In this paper, an unsupervised steganalysis method that combines artificial training setsand supervised classification is proposed. We provide a formal framework for unsupervisedclassification of stego and cover images in the typical situation of targeted steganalysis (i.e.,for a known algorithm and approximate embedding bit rate). We also present a completeset of experiments using 1) eight different image databases, 2) image features based on RichModels, and 3) three different embedding algorithms: Least Significant Bit (LSB) matching,Highly undetectable steganography (HUGO) and Wavelet Obtai…
