Review: Digital image steganography: Survey and analysis of current methods

Each copy of a text document can be made different in a nearly invisible way by repositioning or modifying the appearance of different elements of text, i.e., lines, words, or characters. A unique copy can be registered with its recipient, so that subsequent unauthorized copies that are retrieved can be traced back to the original owner. In this paper we describe and compare several mechanisms for marking documents and several other mechanisms for decoding the marks after documents have been subjected to common types of distortion. The marks are intended to protect documents of limited value that are owned by individuals who would rather possess a legal than an illegal copy if they can be distinguished. We will describe attacks that remove the marks and countermeasures to those attacks. An architecture is described for distributing a large number of copies without burdening the publisher with creating and transmitting the unique documents. The architecture also allows the publisher to determine the identity of a recipient who has illegally redistributed the document, without compromising the privacy of individuals who are not operating illegally. Two experimental systems are described. One was used to distribute an issue of the IEEE JOURNAL ON SELECTED AREAS IN COMMUNICATIONS, and the second was used to mark copies of company private memoranda.

Copyright protection for the electronic distribution of text documents : Identification and protection of multimedia information

This paper presents a literature review of image steganography techniques in the spatial domain for last 5 years. The research community has already done lots of noteworthy research in image steganography. Even though it is interesting to highlight that the existing embedding techniques may not be perfect, the objective of this paper is to provide a comprehensive survey and to highlight the pros and cons of existing up-to-date techniques for researchers that are involved in the designing of image steganographic system. In this article, the general structure of the steganographic system and classifications of image steganographic techniques with its properties in spatial domain are exploited. Furthermore, different performance matrices and steganalysis detection attacks are also discussed. The paper concludes with recommendations and good practices drawn from the reviewed techniques.

Image steganography in spatial domain: A survey

Comprehensive Survey of Image Steganography: Techniques, Evaluations, and Trends in Future Research

Peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR) and structural index similarity (SSIM) are two measuring tools that are widely used in image quality assessment. Especially in the steganography image, these two measuring instruments are used to measure the quality of imperceptibility. PSNR is used earlier than SSIM, is easy, has been widely used in various digital image measurements, and has been considered tested and valid. SSIM is a newer measurement tool that is designed based on three factors i.e. luminance, contrast, and structure to better suit the workings of the human visual system. Some research has discussed the correlation and comparison of these two measuring tools, but no research explicitly discusses and suggests which measurement tool is more suitable for steganography. This study aims to review, prove, and analyze the results of PSNR and SSIM measurements on three spatial domain image steganography methods, i.e. LSB, PVD, and CRT. Color images were chosen as container images because human vision is more sensitive to color changes than grayscale changes. Based on the test results found several opposing findings, where LSB has the most superior value based on PSNR and PVD get the most superior value based on SSIM. Additionally, the changes based on the histogram are more noticeable in LSB and CRT than in PVD. Other analyzes such as RS attack also show results that are more in line with SSIM measurements when compared to PSNR. Based on the results of testing and analysis, this research concludes that SSIM is a better measure of imperceptibility in all aspects and it is preferable that in the next steganographic research at least use SSIM.

PSNR vs SSIM: imperceptibility quality assessment for image steganography

Data hiding method using image interpolation

Steganography is the method of hiding secret data in other data, such as video or an image. A reversible data hiding method can extract the cover image from a stego-image without distortion after extracting the hidden data. In this paper a semi-reversible data hiding method that utilizes interpolation and the least significant substitution technique is proposed. First, interpolation methods are used to scale up and down the cover image before hiding secret data for a higher capacity and quality. Secondly, the LSB substitution method is used to embed secret data. Experimental results show that the proposed method can embed a large amount of secret data while keeping very high visual quality, where the PSNR is guaranteed to be 37.54 dB (k?=?3) and 43.94 dB (k?=?2).

Steganographic method based on interpolation and LSB substitution of digital images

The fundamental objectives of image steganographic algorithm are to simultaneously achieve high payload, good visual imperceptibility, and security. This paper proposes a new data hiding method that increases visual quality and payload, as well as maintains steganographic security. The proposed scheme consists of two novel methods of parity-bit pixel value difference (PBPVD) and improved rightmost digit replacement (iRMDR). It partitions the cover image into two non-overlapping pixel blocks. The difference value between pixels in each block is used to determine the selection of PBPVD and iRMDR. According to the experimental results, the iRMDR method attains the best closest stego-pixels for good visual imperceptibility by resolving the region inconsistency problem in the existing RMDR method. In addition, the method reduces the risk of regular/singular (RS) detection attacks caused by its pixel-digit replacement nature. The PBPVD method exploits the pixel value difference (PVD) to adjust an extra parity bit that increases the payload while retaining the similar visual quality of PVD. Moreover, the iterative readjustment process of PBPVD minimizes the underflow/overflow problem. Overall, the proposed method achieves the steganographic objectives and reduces the detection artifacts against RS and pixel difference histogram analysis. A novel embedding method based on pixel difference and digit replacement techniques.This improves the embedding capacity of classical pixel difference method.The closest selection process is used to maintain the visual imperceptibility.This method reduces the risk of RS and PDH steganalysis detection attacks.

A data hiding scheme using parity-bit pixel value differencing and improved rightmost digit replacement

In data hiding, pixel-value differencing and least significant bit are well-known techniques to embed secret data. In this paper, a novel data hiding scheme is proposed to provide high embedding capacity. In case of previous methods, pixel-value differencing and least significant bit techniques were used individually or in combination based on pixel, but the proposed method utilizes first by dividing the bit region and two schemes are used simultaneously in the same bit plane. The experimental results show that the proposed method has strength on embedding capacity maintaining visual image quality without distortion to the human eyes.

Ki-Hyun Jung

Papers

Image steganography in spatial domain: A survey

Data hiding method using image interpolation

Steganographic method based on interpolation and LSB substitution of digital images

A data hiding scheme using parity-bit pixel value differencing and improved rightmost digit replacement

Data hiding scheme improving embedding capacity using mixed PVD and LSB on bit plane