Hiding Text in Digital Images Using Permutation Ordering and Compact Key Based Dictionary

Abstract

Digital image steganography is an emerging technique in secure communication for the modern connected world. It protects the content of the message without arousing suspicion in a passive observer. A novel steganography method is presented to hide text in digital images. A compact dictionary is designed to efficiently communicate all types of secret messages. The sorting order of pixels in image blocks are chosen as the carrier of embedded information. The high correlation in image pixel values means reordering within image blocks do not cause high distortion. The image is divided into blocks and perturbed to create non repeating sequences of intensity values. These values are then sorted according to the message. At the receiver end, the message is read from the sorting order of the pixels in image blocks. Only those image blocks with standard deviation lesser than a given threshold are chosen for embedding to alleviate visual distortion. Information Security is provided by shuffling the dictionary according to a shared key. Experimental Results and Analysis show that the method is capable of hiding text with more than 4000 words in a 512×512 grayscale image with a peak signal to noise ratio above 40 decibels.