High-Capacity Image Steganography with Minimum Modified Bits Based on Data Mapping and LSB Substitution

Autor: Abdul Alif Zakaria, Mehdi Hussain, Ainuddin Wahid Abdul Wahab, Mohd Yamani Idna Idris, Norli Anida Abdullah, Ki-Hyun Jung
Jazyk: angličtina
Rok vydání: 2018
Předmět:
Zdroj: Applied Sciences, Vol 8, Iss 11, p 2199 (2018)
Druh dokumentu: article
ISSN: 2076-3417
DOI: 10.3390/app8112199
Popis: 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.
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