High-Capacity Image Steganography with Minimum Modified Bits Based on Data Mapping and LSB Substitution
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
1-1-2018
Abstract
Steganography is the art and practice of communication using hidden messages. The least significant bits (LSB) based method is the well-known type of steganography in the spatial domain. Usually, achieving the larger embedding capacity in LSB-based methods requires a large number of LSB bits modification which indirectly reduces the visual quality of stego-image and increases the risk of steganalysis detection attacks. In this study, we propose a novel steganography method with data mapping strategy which can reduce the number of bits modification per pixel. In the proposed method, four secret data bits are mapped with the four most significant bits of a cover pixel. Furthermore, the only two LSBs of a pixel are modified to indicate the mapping strategy. Experimental results show that the proposed method is able to achieve 3.48% larger embedding capacity while enhancing the visual quality (i.e., peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR) 3.73 dB) and reducing the modification of 0.76 bits per pixel. Moreover, the proposed method provides security against basic Regular and Singular groups (RS) steganalysis and histogram steganalysis detection attacks.
Keywords
steganography, mapping data hiding, information hiding, spatial domain, least significant bits, most significant bits
Divisions
foundation,fsktm
Funders
CyberSecurity Malaysia,Special Assistance Research Grant of University of Malaya (BKS107-2017),Basic Science Research Program through the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) funded by the Ministry of Education (NRF-2015R1D1A1A01058019)
Publication Title
Applied Sciences
Volume
8
Issue
11
Publisher
MDPI