Ant colony optimization (ACO) based data hiding in image complex region

This paper presents data an Ant colony optimization (ACO) based data hiding technique. ACO is used to detect complex region of cover image and afterward, least significant bits (LSB) substitution is used to hide secret information in the detected complex regions’ pixels. ACO is an algorithm developed inspired by the inborn manners of ant species. The ant leaves pheromone on the ground for searching food and provisions. The proposed ACO-based data hiding in complex region establishes an array of pheromone, also called pheromone matrix, which represents the complex region in sequence at each pixel position of the cover image. The pheromone matrix is developed according to the movements of ants, determined by local differences of the image element’s intensity. The least significant bits of complex region pixels are substituted with message bits, in order to hide secret information. The experimental results, provided, show the significance of the performance of the proposed method

Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) based Data Hiding in Image Complex Region

This paper presents data an Ant colony optimization (ACO) based data hiding technique. ACO is used to detect complex region of cover image and afterward, least significant bits (LSB) substitution is used to hide secret information in the detected complex regions’ pixels. ACO is an algorithm developed inspired by the inborn manners of ant species. The ant leaves pheromone on the ground for searching food and provisions. The proposed ACO-based data hiding in complex region establishes an array of pheromone, also called pheromone matrix, which represents the complex region in sequence at each pixel position of the cover image. The pheromone matrix is developed according to the movements of ants, determined by local differences of the image element’s intensity. The least significant bits of complex region pixels are substituted with message bits, to hide secret information. The experimental results, provided, show the significance of the performance of the proposed method

A combination of least significant bit and deflate compression for image steganography

Steganography is one of the cryptography techniques where secret information can be hidden through multimedia files such as images and videos. Steganography can offer a way of exchanging secret and encrypted information in an untypical mechanism where communicating parties can only interpret the secret message. The literature has shown a great interest in the least significant bit (LSB) technique which aims at embedding the secret message bits into the most insignificant bits of the image pixels. Although LSB showed a stable performance of image steganography yet, many works should be done on the message part. This paper aims to propose a combination of LSB and Deflate compression algorithm for image steganography. The proposed Deflate algorithm utilized both LZ77 and Huffman coding. After compressing the message text, LSB has been applied to embed the text within the cover image. Using benchmark images, the proposed method demonstrated an outperformance over the state of the art. This can proof the efficacy of using Deflate as a data compression prior to the LSB embedding

Efficiency of LSB steganography on medical information

The development of the medical field had led to the transformation of communication from paper information into the digital form. Medical information security had become a great concern as the medical field is moving towards the digital world and hence patient information, disease diagnosis and so on are all being stored in the digital image. Therefore, to improve the medical information security, securing of patient information and the increasing requirements for communication to be transferred between patients, client, medical practitioners, and sponsors is essential to be secured. The core aim of this research is to make available a complete knowledge about the research trends on LSB Steganography Technique, which are applied to securing medical information such as text, image, audio, video and graphics and also discuss the efficiency of the LSB technique. The survey findings show that LSB steganography technique is efficient in securing medical information from intruder

An improved image steganography scheme based on distinction grade value and secret message encryption

Steganography is an emerging and greatly demanding technique for secure information communication over the internet using a secret cover object. It can be used for a wide range of applications such as safe circulation of secret data in intelligence, industry, health care, habitat, online voting, mobile banking and military. Commonly, digital images are used as covers for the steganography owing to their redundancy in the representation, making them hidden to the intruders, hackers, adversaries, unauthorized users. Still, any steganography system launched over the Internet can be cracked upon recognizing the stego cover. Thus, the undetectability that involves data imperceptibility or concealment and security is the significant trait of any steganography system. Presently, the design and development of an effective image steganography system are facing several challenges including low capacity, poor robustness and imperceptibility. To surmount such limitations, it is important to improve the capacity and security of the steganography system while maintaining a high signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR). Based on these factors, this study is aimed to design and develop a distinction grade value (DGV) method to effectively embed the secret data into a cover image for achieving a robust steganography scheme. The design and implementation of the proposed scheme involved three phases. First, a new encryption method called the shuffle the segments of secret message (SSSM) was incorporated with an enhanced Huffman compression algorithm to improve the text security and payload capacity of the scheme. Second, the Fibonacci-based image transformation decomposition method was used to extend the pixel's bit from 8 to 12 for improving the robustness of the scheme. Third, an improved embedding method was utilized by integrating a random block/pixel selection with the DGV and implicit secret key generation for enhancing the imperceptibility of the scheme. The performance of the proposed scheme was assessed experimentally to determine the imperceptibility, security, robustness and capacity. The standard USC-SIPI images dataset were used as the benchmarking for the performance evaluation and comparison of the proposed scheme with the previous works. The resistance of the proposed scheme was tested against the statistical, X2 , Histogram and non-structural steganalysis detection attacks. The obtained PSNR values revealed the accomplishment of higher imperceptibility and security by the proposed DGV scheme while a higher capacity compared to previous works. In short, the proposed steganography scheme outperformed the commercially available data hiding schemes, thereby resolved the existing issues

Analysis review on spatial and transform domain technique in digital steganography

This paper presents several techniques used in digital steganography in term of spatial and transform domain. Additionally, it analyses the performance and the metric evaluation of the techniques used in digital steganography based on spatial and transform domain. This paper aims to identify the main mediums of digital steganography, which are image-based, video-based and audio-based, in order to recognize the various techniques used with them. As a result, the primary technique used in the digital medium was LSB technique in the spatial domain, while in the transform domain, the main technique used was differentiated between DTC and DWT. Meanwhile, the common domain utilized in digital steganography was the spatial domain due to its simplicity and high embedding capacity. The future efforts for this paper will be considering the feature based in text steganography

Spread spectrum-based video watermarking algorithms for copyright protection

Merged with duplicate record 10026.1/2263 on 14.03.2017 by CS (TIS)Digital technologies know an unprecedented expansion in the last years. The consumer can now benefit from hardware and software which was considered state-of-the-art several years ago. The advantages offered by the digital technologies are major but the same digital technology opens the door for unlimited piracy. Copying an analogue VCR tape was certainly possible and relatively easy, in spite of various forms of protection, but due to the analogue environment, the subsequent copies had an inherent loss in quality. This was a natural way of limiting the multiple copying of a video material. With digital technology, this barrier disappears, being possible to make as many copies as desired, without any loss in quality whatsoever. Digital watermarking is one of the best available tools for fighting this threat. The aim of the present work was to develop a digital watermarking system compliant with the recommendations drawn by the EBU, for video broadcast monitoring. Since the watermark can be inserted in either spatial domain or transform domain, this aspect was investigated and led to the conclusion that wavelet transform is one of the best solutions available. Since watermarking is not an easy task, especially considering the robustness under various attacks several techniques were employed in order to increase the capacity/robustness of the system: spread-spectrum and modulation techniques to cast the watermark, powerful error correction to protect the mark, human visual models to insert a robust mark and to ensure its invisibility. The combination of these methods led to a major improvement, but yet the system wasn't robust to several important geometrical attacks. In order to achieve this last milestone, the system uses two distinct watermarks: a spatial domain reference watermark and the main watermark embedded in the wavelet domain. By using this reference watermark and techniques specific to image registration, the system is able to determine the parameters of the attack and revert it. Once the attack was reverted, the main watermark is recovered. The final result is a high capacity, blind DWr-based video watermarking system, robust to a wide range of attacks.BBC Research & Developmen

State-of-the-art application of artificial neural network in digital watermarking and the way forward

Several high-ranking watermarking schemes using neural networks have been proposed in order to make the watermark stronger to resist attacks.The ability of Artificial Neural Network, ANN to learn, do mapping, classify, and adapt has increased the interest of researcher in application of different types ANN in watermarking.In this paper, ANN based approached have been categorized based on their application to different components of watermarking such as; capacity estimate, watermark embedding, recovery of watermark and error rate detection. We propose a new component of water marking, Secure Region, SR in which, ANN can be used to identify such region within the estimated capacity. Hence an attack-proof watermarking system can be achieved

Security and imperceptibility improving of image steganography using pixel allocation and random function techniques

Information security is one of the main aspects of processes and methodologies in the technical age of information and communication. The security of information should be a key priority in the secret exchange of information between two parties. In order to ensure the security of information, there are some strategies that are used, and they include steganography and cryptography. An effective digital image-steganographic method based on odd/even pixel allocation and random function to increase the security and imperceptibility has been improved. This lately developed outline has been verified for increasing the security and imperceptibility to determine the existent problems. Huffman coding has been used to modify secret data prior embedding stage; this modified equivalent secret data that prevent the secret data from attackers to increase the secret data capacities. The main objective of our scheme is to boost the peak-signal-to-noise-ratio (PSNR) of the stego cover and stop against any attack. The size of the secret data also increases. The results confirm good PSNR values in addition of these findings confirmed the proposed method eligibility

Optimization of medical image steganography using n-decomposition genetic algorithm

Protecting patients' confidential information is a critical concern in medical image steganography. The Least Significant Bits (LSB) technique has been widely used for secure communication. However, it is susceptible to imperceptibility and security risks due to the direct manipulation of pixels, and ASCII patterns present limitations. Consequently, sensitive medical information is subject to loss or alteration. Despite attempts to optimize LSB, these issues persist due to (1) the formulation of the optimization suffering from non-valid implicit constraints, causing inflexibility in reaching optimal embedding, (2) lacking convergence in the searching process, where the message length significantly affects the size of the solution space, and (3) issues of application customizability where different data require more flexibility in controlling the embedding process. To overcome these limitations, this study proposes a technique known as an n-decomposition genetic algorithm. This algorithm uses a variable-length search to identify the best location to embed the secret message by incorporating constraints to avoid local minimum traps. The methodology consists of five main phases: (1) initial investigation, (2) formulating an embedding scheme, (3) constructing a decomposition scheme, (4) integrating the schemes' design into the proposed technique, and (5) evaluating the proposed technique's performance based on parameters using medical datasets from kaggle.com. The proposed technique showed resistance to statistical analysis evaluated using Reversible Statistical (RS) analysis and histogram. It also demonstrated its superiority in imperceptibility and security measured by MSE and PSNR to Chest and Retina datasets (0.0557, 0.0550) and (60.6696, 60.7287), respectively. Still, compared to the results obtained by the proposed technique, the benchmark outperforms the Brain dataset due to the homogeneous nature of the images and the extensive black background. This research has contributed to genetic-based decomposition in medical image steganography and provides a technique that offers improved security without compromising efficiency and convergence. However, further validation is required to determine its effectiveness in real-world applications