Showing papers on "Steganography published in 2013"
17 Jun 2013
TL;DR: The proposed universal distortion is additive and evaluates the cost of changing an image element from directional residuals obtained using a Daubechies wavelet filter bank and is demonstrated by constructing steganographic schemes in the spatial, JPEG, and side-informed JPEG domains, and comparing their security to current state-of-the-art methods using classifiers trained with rich media models.
Abstract: Currently, the most secure practical steganographic schemes for empirical cover sources embed their payload while minimizing a distortion function designed to capture statistical detectability. Since there exists a general framework for this embedding paradigm with established payload-distortion bounds as well as near-optimal practical coding schemes, building an embedding scheme has been essentially reduced to the distortion design. This is not an easy task as relating distortion to statistical detectability is a hard and open problem. In this article, we propose an innovative idea to measure the embedding distortion in one fixed domain independently of the domain where the embedding changes (and coding) are carried out. The proposed universal distortion is additive and evaluates the cost of changing an image element (e.g., pixel or DCT coefficient) from directional residuals obtained using a Daubechies wavelet filter bank. The intuition is to limit the embedding changes only to those parts of the cover that are difficult to model in multiple directions while avoiding smooth regions and clean edges. The utility of the universal distortion is demonstrated by constructing steganographic schemes in the spatial, JPEG, and side-informed JPEG domains, and comparing their security to current state-of-the-art methods using classifiers trained with rich media models.
277 citations
17 Jun 2013
TL;DR: This position paper sets out some of the important questions which have been left unanswered, as well as highlighting some that have already been addressed successfully, for steganography and steganalysis to be used in the real world.
Abstract: There has been an explosion of academic literature on steganography and steganalysis in the past two decades. With a few exceptions, such papers address abstractions of the hiding and detection problems, which arguably have become disconnected from the real world. Most published results, including by the authors of this paper, apply "in laboratory conditions" and some are heavily hedged by assumptions and caveats; significant challenges remain unsolved in order to implement good steganography and steganalysis in practice. This position paper sets out some of the important questions which have been left unanswered, as well as highlighting some that have already been addressed successfully, for steganography and steganalysis to be used in the real world.
246 citations
TL;DR: The traditional way to represent digital images for feature based steganalysis is to compute a noise residual from the image using a pixel predictor and then form the feature as a sample joint probability distribution of neighboring quantized residual samples - the co-occurrence matrix is proposed.
Abstract: The traditional way to represent digital images for feature based steganalysis is to compute a noise residual from the image using a pixel predictor and then form the feature as a sample joint probability distribution of neighboring quantized residual samples-the so - called co-occurrence matrix. In this paper, we propose an alternative statistical representation - instead of forming the co-occurrence matrix, we project neighboring residual samples onto a set of random vectors and take the first-order statistic (histogram) of the projections as the feature. When multiple residuals are used, this representation is called the projection spatial rich model (PSRM). On selected modern steganographic algorithms embedding in the spatial, JPEG, and side-informed JPEG domains, we demonstrate that the PSRM can achieve a more accurate detection as well as a substantially improved performance versus dimensionality trade-off than state-of-the-art feature sets.
227 citations
TL;DR: A novel prediction-based reversible steganographic scheme based on image inpainting that provides a greater embedding rate and better visual quality compared with recently reported methods.
Abstract: In this paper, we propose a novel prediction-based reversible steganographic scheme based on image inpainting. First, reference pixels are chosen adaptively according to the distribution characteristics of the image content. Then, the image inpainting technique based on partial differential equations is introduced to generate a prediction image that has similar structural and geometric information as the cover image. Finally, by using the two selected groups of peak points and zero points, the histogram of the prediction error is shifted to embed the secret bits reversibly. Since the same reference pixels can be exploited in the extraction procedure, the embedded secret bits can be extracted from the stego image correctly, and the cover image can be restored losslessly. Through the use of the adaptive strategy for choosing reference pixels and the inpainting predictor, the prediction accuracy is high, and more embeddable pixels are acquired. Thus, the proposed scheme provides a greater embedding rate and better visual quality compared with recently reported methods.
227 citations
TL;DR: A wavelet-based steganography technique has been introduced which combines encryption and scrambling technique to protect patient confidential data and it is found that the proposed technique provides high-security protection for patients data with low distortion and ECG data remain diagnosable after watermarking.
Abstract: With the growing number of aging population and a significant portion of that suffering from cardiac diseases, it is conceivable that remote ECG patient monitoring systems are expected to be widely used as point-of-care (PoC) applications in hospitals around the world. Therefore, huge amount of ECG signal collected by body sensor networks from remote patients at homes will be transmitted along with other physiological readings such as blood pressure, temperature, glucose level, etc., and diagnosed by those remote patient monitoring systems. It is utterly important that patient confidentiality is protected while data are being transmitted over the public network as well as when they are stored in hospital servers used by remote monitoring systems. In this paper, a wavelet-based steganography technique has been introduced which combines encryption and scrambling technique to protect patient confidential data. The proposed method allows ECG signal to hide its corresponding patient confidential data and other physiological information thus guaranteeing the integration between ECG and the rest. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed technique on the ECG signal, two distortion measurement metrics have been used: the percentage residual difference and the wavelet weighted PRD. It is found that the proposed technique provides high-security protection for patients data with low (less than 1%) distortion and ECG data remain diagnosable after watermarking (i.e., hiding patient confidential data) and as well as after watermarks (i.e., hidden data) are removed from the watermarked data.
162 citations
Journal Article•
TL;DR: This paper critically analyzed various steganographic techniques and also has covered steganography overview its major types, classification, applications.
Abstract: Abspract Steganography is going to gain its importance due to the exponential growth and secret communication of potential computer users over the internet. It can also be defined as the study of invisible communication that usually deals with the ways of hiding the existence of the communicated message. Generally data embedding is achieved in communication, image, text, voice or multimedia content for copyright, military communication, authentication and many other purposes. In image Steganography, secret communication is achieved to embed a message into cover image (used as the carrier to embed message into) and generate a stegoimage (generated image which is carrying a hidden message). In this paper we have critically analyzed various steganographic techniques and also have covered steganography overview its major types, classification, applications.
126 citations
26 May 2013
TL;DR: This paper adopts a different strategy in which the cover is modeled as a sequence of independent but not necessarily identically distributed quantized Gaussians and the embedding change probabilities are derived to minimize the total KL divergence within the chosen model for a given embedding operation and payload.
Abstract: Currently, the most successful approach to steganography in empirical objects, such as digital media, is to cast the embedding problem as source coding with a fidelity constraint. The sender specifies the costs of changing each cover element and then embeds a given payload by minimizing the total embedding cost. Since efficient practical codes exist that embed near the rate-distortion bound, the remaining task left to the steganographer is the fidelity measure - the choice of the costs. In the past, the costs were obtained either in an ad hoc manner or determined from the effects of embedding in a chosen feature space. In this paper, we adopt a different strategy in which the cover is modeled as a sequence of independent but not necessarily identically distributed quantized Gaussians and the embedding change probabilities are derived to minimize the total KL divergence within the chosen model for a given embedding operation and payload. Despite the simplicity of the adopted model, the resulting stegosystem exhibits security that is comparable to current state-of-the-art methods methods across a wide range of payloads.
112 citations
TL;DR: This paper is an attempt to analyse the various techniques used in steganography and to identify areas in which this technique can be applied, so that the human race can be benefited at large.
Abstract: The art of information hiding has received much attention in the recent years as security of information has become a big concern in this internet era. As sharing of sensitive information via a common communication channel has become inevitable, Steganography – the art and science of hiding information has gained much attention. We are also surrounded by a world of secret communication, where people of all types are transmitting information as innocent as an encrypted credit card number to an online-store and as insidious as a terrorist plot to hijackers. Steganography derives from the Greek word steganos, meaning covered or secret, and graphy (writing or drawing) [1]. Steganography is a technology where modern data compression, information theory, spread spectrum, and cryptography technologies are brought together to satisfy the need for privacy on the Internet. This paper is an attempt to analyse the various techniques used in steganography and to identify areas in which this technique can be applied, so that the human race can be benefited at large.
102 citations
TL;DR: This work presents a novel reversible data hiding scheme based on combinations of pixel orientations located at two steganographic images to enhance embedding capacity and preserve good visual quality and outperforms other related schemes in terms of embedding rate.
Abstract: This work presents a novel reversible data hiding scheme based on combinations of pixel orientations located at two steganographic images to enhance embedding capacity and preserve good visual quality. Before secret data are embedded, the proposed scheme converts the data into a sequence of digits in a base-5 numeral system. The conversion then extends the abilitity to carry more secret data. When the secret data embedding procedure is performed, the original cover pixel value can only be modified by at most plus or minus one, thus ensuring that the stegano-image also has excellent visual quality. Moreover, image recovery does not require overhead information. Experimental results demonstrate that the embedding capacity is around 1.07 bpp and PSNR reaches 49.6 dB. The experimental comparison also reveals that the proposed scheme outperforms other related schemes in terms of embedding rate and retains a high visual effect of stegano-image.
101 citations
TL;DR: A survey of the existing VoIP steganography methods and their countermeasures can be found in this article, where the authors present a first survey of these methods and countermeasures.
Abstract: Steganography is an ancient art that encompasses various techniques of information hiding, the aim of which is to embed secret information into a carrier message. Steganographic methods are usually aimed at hiding the very existence of the communication. Due to the rise in popularity of IP telephony, together with the large volume of data and variety of protocols involved, it is currently attracting the attention of the research community as a perfect carrier for steganographic purposes. This article is a first survey of the existing Voice over IP (VoIP) steganography methods and their countermeasures.
98 citations
27 Sep 2013
TL;DR: This work is concerned with implementing Steganography for images, with an improvement in both security and image quality, and shows good enhancement to Least Significant Bit technique in consideration to security as well as image quality.
Abstract: This work is concerned with implementing Steganography for images, with an improvement in both security and image quality. The one that is implemented here is a variation of plain LSB (Least Significant Bit) algorithm. The stego-image quality is improved by using bit-inversion technique. In this technique, certain least significant bits of cover image are inverted after LSB steganography that co-occur with some pattern of other bits and that reduces the number of modified LSBs. Thus, less number of least significant bits of cover image is altered in comparison to plain LSB method, improving the PSNR of stegoimage. By storing the bit patterns for which LSBs are inverted, message image can be obtained correctly. To improve the robustness of steganography, RC4 algorithm has been used to achieve the randomization in hiding message image bits into cover image pixels instead of storing them sequentially. This process randomly disperses the bits of the message in the cover image and thus, making it harder for unauthorized people to extract the original message. The proposed method shows good enhancement to Least Significant Bit technique in consideration to security as well as image quality.
TL;DR: A non-expanded block-based progressive visual secret sharing scheme with noise-like and meaningful shares with several advantages over other related methods, including one that is more suitable for grayscale and color secret images.
01 Jan 2013
TL;DR: A new technique of image steganography i.e. Hash-LSB with RSA algorithm is proposed for providing more security to data as well as the data hiding method.
Abstract: Steganography is a method of hiding secret messages in a cover object while communication takes place between sender and receiver. Security of confidential information has always been a major issue from the past times to the present time. It has always been the interested topic for researchers to develop secure techniques to send data without revealing it to anyone other than the receiver. Therefore from time to time researchers have developed many techniques to fulfill secure transfer of data and steganography is one of them. In this paper we have proposed a new technique of image steganography i.e. Hash-LSB with RSA algorithm for providing more security to data as well as our data hiding method. The proposed technique uses a hash function to generate a pattern for hiding data bits into LSB of RGB pixel values of the cover image. This technique makes sure that the message has been encrypted before hiding it into a cover image. If in any case the cipher text got revealed from the cover image, the intermediate person other than receiver can't access the message as it is in encrypted form.
TL;DR: A novel, reversible, data hiding scheme for high quality images is proposed in spatial domain that provides a larger payload and a better image quality than some existing schemes and is more stable for different images.
TL;DR: An empirical comparison of the proposed approaches with some of the popular text steganographic approaches is presented and it is shown that the approaches outperform the existing approaches.
Abstract: This paper presents three novel approaches of text steganography. The first approach uses the theme of missing letter puzzle where each character of message is hidden by missing one or more letters in a word of cover. The average Jaro score was found to be 0.95 indicating closer similarity between cover and stego file. The second approach hides a message in a wordlist where ASCII value of embedded character determines length and starting letter of a word. The third approach conceals a message, without degrading cover, by using start and end letter of words of the cover. For enhancing the security of secret message, the message is scrambled using one-time pad scheme before being concealed and cipher text is then concealed in cover. We also present an empirical comparison of the proposed approaches with some of the popular text steganographic approaches and show that our approaches outperform the existing approaches.
TL;DR: Phase mask encryption is proposed to improve the transmission privacy of an optical steganography system by encrypting the stealth signal carried by amplified spontaneous emission noise by a fast changing code.
Abstract: We propose and experimentally demonstrate an optical steganography method in which a data signal is transmitted using amplified spontaneous emission (ASE) noise as a carrier. The ASE serving as a carrier for the private signal has an identical frequency spectrum to the existing noise generated by the Erbium doped fiber amplifiers (EDFAs) in the transmission system. The system also carries a conventional data channel that is not private. The so-called “stealth” or private channel is well-hidden within the noise of the system. Phase modulation is used for both the stealth channel and the public channel. Using homodyne detection, the short coherence length of the ASE ensures that the stealth signal can only be recovered if the receiver closely matches the delay-length difference, which is deliberately changed in a dynamic fashion that is only known to the transmitter and its intended receiver.
TL;DR: Experimental results reveal that the proposed PRT and PRT-PVD methods not only have better embedding efficiency over the existing methods, but also are robust to detection by modern steganalysis tools.
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors proposed three text steganographic approaches based on the missing letter puzzle, where each character of a message is hidden by missing one or more letters in a word of cover.
Abstract: This paper presents three novel approaches of text steganography. The first approach uses the theme of missing letter puzzle where each character of message is hidden by missing one or more letters in a word of cover. The average Jaro score was found to be 0.95 indicating closer similarity between cover and stego file. The second approach hides a message in a wordlist where ASCII value of embedded character determines length and starting letter of a word. The third approach conceals a message, without degrading cover, by using start and end letter of words of the cover. For enhancing the security of secret message, the message is scrambled using one-time pad scheme before being concealed and cipher text is then concealed in cover. We also present an empirical comparison of the proposed approaches with some of the popular text steganographic approaches and show that our approaches outperform the existing approaches .
TL;DR: Experimental results show a substantial improvement in the Peak Signal Noise Ratio (PS NR) and Image Fidelity (IF) values after optimization over the base technique.
TL;DR: This paper provides a novel image steganography technique to hide multiple secret images and keys in color cover image using Integer W avelet Transform (IWT).
Abstract: Steganography is the science of invisible communication. The purpose of Steganography is to maintain secret communication between two parties. The secret information can be concealed in content such as image, audio, or video. This paper provides a novel image steganography technique to hide multiple secret images and keys in color cover image using Integer Wavelet Transform (IWT). There is no visual difference between the stego image and the cover image. The extracted secret images are also similar to the original secret images. Very good PSNR (Peak Signal to Noise Ratio) values are obtained for both stego and extracted secret images. The results are compared with the results of other techniques, where single image is hidden and it is found that the proposed technique is simple and gives better PSNR values than others.
01 Dec 2013
TL;DR: Video Steganography is used to hide a secret video stream in cover video stream using sequential encoding of Cover video using 8-bit binary values and encrypted using XOR with secret key.
Abstract: Need of hiding information from intruders has been around since ancient times. Nowadays Digital media is getting advanced like text, image, audio, video etc. To maintain the secrecy of information, different methods of hiding have been evolved. One of them is Steganography, which means hiding information under some other information without noticeable change in cover information. Recently Video Steganography has become a boon for providing large amount of data to be transferred secretly. Video is simply a sequence of images, hence much space is available in between for hiding information. In proposed scheme video steganography is used to hide a secret video stream in cover video stream. Each frame of secret video will be broken into individual components then converted into 8-bit binary values, and encrypted using XOR with secret key and encrypted frames will be hidden in the least significant bit of each frames using sequential encoding of Cover video. To enhance more security each bit of secret frames will be stored in cover frames following a pattern BGRRGBGR.
15 Jul 2013
TL;DR: This paper presents a new adaptive embedding scheme: Adaptive Steganography by Oracle (ASO), based on an oracle used to calculate the detectability map, and this oracle use the Kodovský's ensemble classifiers, which improves the security.
Abstract: HUGO [1] and MOD [2] are the most secure adaptive embedding algorithms of 2011. These algorithms strive to hide a secret message, while minimizing an ad hoc embedding impact. They use a detectability map, which, if properly defined, is correlated to the security. In this paper, we present a new adaptive embedding scheme: Adaptive Steganography by Oracle (ASO). It is based on an oracle used to calculate the detectability map, and this oracle use the Kodovsky's ensemble classifiers [3]. Our approach preserves both cover image and sender's database distributions during the embedding process, which improves the security. In addition, it offers to the sender the opportunity to choose the most reliable image( s), during his secret communication. Experimental results show that our embedding scheme presents good security performances, since the detection error of ASO is much higher than that of HUGO.
TL;DR: An embedding algorithm for hiding encrypted messages in nonadjacent and random pixel locations in edges and smooth areas of images and is better in PSNR value and Capacity as shown experimentally than existing techniques.
Abstract: This paper proposes an improved LSB(least Significant bit) based Steganography technique for images imparting better information security .It presents an embedding algorithm for hiding encrypted messages in nonadjacent and random pixel locations in edges and smooth areas of images. It first encrypts the secret message, and detects edges in the cover-image using improved edge detection filter. Message bits are then, embedded in the least significant byte of randomly selected edge area pixels and 1-3-4 LSBs of red, green, blue components respectively across randomly selected pixels across smooth area of image. It ensures that the eavesdroppers will not have any suspicion that message bits are hidden in the image and standard steganography detection methods can not estimate the length of the secret message correctly. The Proposed approach is better in PSNR value and Capacity as shown experimentally than existing techniques.
TL;DR: A novel reversible data hiding scheme based on the histogram-shifting-imitated approach that manipulates the peak points of segments based on image intensity to create an effective multiple-layer embedding without loss in image fidelity.
TL;DR: A novel hybrid digital watermarking technique, based on the exploitation of both the RGB and the YCbCr colour spaces, using spatial domain techniques is presented, which withstands geometric and processing attacks to where commercial value of images would be lost.
TL;DR: This paper presents an efficient spatial domain based image hiding scheme, using Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO), used to find the best pixel locations in a gray scale cover image where the secret gray scale image pixel data can be embedded.
TL;DR: Experimental results show that the stego-image is visually indistinguishable from the original cover-image in the case of 24 bit, and how improved LSB method for 24 bit color image is better than LSB technique for 8 bitcolor image is shown.
Abstract: In this paper, author have propose a steganographic technique by using improved LSB (least significant bit) replacement method for 24 bit color image capable of producing a secretembedded image that is totally indistinguishable from the original image by the human eye. In addition this paper shows that how improved LSB method for 24 bit color image is better than LSB technique for 8 bit color image. Firstly LSB method for both 8 bit and 24 bit color image are described and then improved LSB method for 24 bit color image, compare their result by calculating PSNR (Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio), MSE (Mean Squared Error) and finally by histogram analysis. LSB Algorithm embedded MSB of secret image into LSB of cover image. In the case of 24 bit color image two methods are described. In first method, last 2 LSB of each plane (red, green and blue) of cover image, is replaced by 2 MSB of secret image. In the second method, last LSB of each red plane is replaced by first MSB of secret image, last 2 LSB of each green plane by next 2 MSB of secret image and then last 3 LSB of blue plane is replaced by next 3 MSB of secret image. This means that total 6 bits of secret image can be hide in 24 bit color image. Experimental results show that the stego-image is visually indistinguishable from the original cover-image in the case of 24 bit.
TL;DR: An edge adaptive image steganography mechanism which combines the benefits of matrix encoding and LSBM to embed data and also uses a chaotic mapping scheme to provide enhanced security to the payload is proposed.
01 Dec 2013
TL;DR: A reversible data hiding method based on the magic matrix that can embed a large amount of confidential data and can achieve good visual quality, which exceed those of recently presented methods.
Abstract: Lee and Huang proposed a dual-image reversible data hiding method to protect the confidential data in 2011. The image quality obtained by the method is good because each pixel in the cover image is modified by only adding or subtracting one to generate the stego image. However, in their method, each set of four cover pixels can only embed five confidential bits, thereby restricting the embedding rate. To overcome the above drawback, this work develops a reversible data hiding method based on the magic matrix. By using the proposed method, each set of two cover pixels can be used to embed at least three confidential bits. In the embedding procedure, the maximum modification level of the cover pixel is four. These features imply that the proposed method can embed a large amount of confidential data; in addition, our stego image can achieve good visual quality. Experimental results indicate that the embedding rate and the image quality of the proposed method are 1.55 bpp and 39.89 dB, which exceed those of recently presented methods.