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

A.A. Abdulla, H. Sellahewa & S.A. Jassim, “Steganography based on pixel intensity value decomposition”, Proc. Mobile Multimedia/Image Processing, Security, and Applications (SPIE 9120, 912005, May 2014); doi: 10.1117/12.2050518.

This paper focuses on steganography based on pixel intensity value decomposition. A number of existing schemes such as binary, Fibonacci, Prime, Natural, Lucas, and Catalan-Fibonacci (CF) are evaluated in terms of payload capacity and stego quality. A new technique based on a specific representation is proposed to decompose pixel intensity values into 16 (virtual) bit-planes suitable for embedding purposes. The proposed decomposition has a desirable property whereby the sum of all bit-planes does not exceed the maximum pixel intensity value, i.e. 255. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed technique offers an effective compromise between payload capacity and stego quality of existing embedding techniques based on pixel intensity value decomposition. Its capacity is equal to that of binary and Lucas, while it offers a higher capacity than Fibonacci, Prime, Natural, and CF when the secret bits are embedded in 1^st Least Significant Bit (LSB). When the secret bits are embedded in higher bit-planes, i.e., 2^nd LSB to 8^th Most Significant Bit (MSB), the proposed scheme has more capacity than Natural numbers based embedding. However, from the 6^th bit-plane onwards, the proposed scheme offers better stego quality. In general, the proposed decomposition scheme has less effect in terms of quality on pixel value when compared to most existing pixel intensity value decomposition techniques when embedding messages in higher bit-planes.

Harin Sellahewa is Senior Lecturer in Computing at Buckingham, Sabah Jassim is Professor of Mathematics, and Alan Anwer Abdulla is a research student.