Title: Intricacies in image steganography and innovative directions

Authors: N. Krishnaveni; P. Sudhakar

Addresses: Research and Development Centre, Bharathiar University, Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, India ' Bharathiyar University, Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu 641046, India

Abstract: With the advancement in digital communication and data sets getting huge due to computerisation of data gathering worldwide, the need for data security in transmission also increases. Cryptography and steganography are well known methods available to provide security where the former use techniques that control information in order to cipher or hide their presence and the latter concentrates on data concealment. Steganography is the practice of masking data especially multimedia data within another data. Visual contents get more importance from people compared to audio contents and moreover visual content file is huge when compared to audio file thereby helping increase robustness of the hiding algorithms. In this paper, we consider three domains in which the image steganography algorithms are proposed along with the experimentation results on USC-SIPI image database which prove the betterment of the algorithms as compared with the traditional algorithms. We propose to use rule based LSB substitution method in spatial domain, XOR based hiding in frequency domain and data encryption standard based embedding in wavelet domain. We find that the proposed algorithms have a better PSNR value averaging close to 53 after embedding the secret data, while the existing algorithms has values of around 50.

Keywords: peak signal to noise ratio; PSNR; quantisation; discrete cosine transformation; wavelet; steganalysis; cipher text.

DOI: 10.1504/IJAIP.2022.125233

International Journal of Advanced Intelligence Paradigms, 2022 Vol.23 No.1/2, pp.55 - 71

Received: 19 May 2017
Accepted: 23 May 2017
Published online: 05 Sep 2022 *

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