Publication of the week: A.A. Abdulla, H. Sellahewa & S.A. Jassim

12 January 2015

Abdulla, A.A., Sellahewa, H. & Jassim, S.A., “Stego quality enhancement by message size reduction and fibonacci bit-plane mapping”, Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics), 8893 (2014), pp.151-166

Steganography is concerned with concealing a secret message by embedding it in another innocuous message during seemingly mundane communication sessions in such a way that only the sender and intended recipient are aware of the secret’s existence. This paper is primarily concerned with improving quality and robustness aspects of steganography techniques whilst maintaining a full payload capacity.

An efficient 2-step steganography technique is proposed to enhance stego image quality and secret message un-detectability. The first step is a preprocessing algorithm that reduces the size of secret images without losing information. This results in improved stego image quality compared to other existing image steganography methods. The proposed secret image size reduction (SISR) algorithm is an efficient spatial domain technique. The second step is an embedding mechanism that relies on Fibonacci representation of pixel intensities to minimize the effect of embedding on the stego image quality. The improvement is attained by using bit-plane(s) mapping instead of bit-plane(s) replacement for embedding. The proposed embedding mechanism outperforms the binary based LSB randomly embedding in two ways: reduced effect on stego quality and increased robustness against statistical steganalysers. Experimental results demonstrate the benefits of the proposed scheme in terms of: 1) SISR ratio (indirectly results in increased capacity); 2) quality of the stego; and 3) robustness against steganalysers such as RS, and WS. Furthermore, experimental results show that the proposed SISR algorithm can be extended to be applicable on DICOM standard medical images. Future security standardization research is proposed that would focus on evaluating the security, performance, and effectiveness of steganography algorithms.