Innovative Multi-Level Secure Steganographic Scheme based on Pixel Value Difference

Abstract

Steganography is one of the branches of information security field, it aims to hide information in unremarkable cover media so as not to arouse an eavesdropper's suspicion. The secret message is hidden in such a way that no significant degradation can be detected in the quality of the original image. The aim of this paper is to introduce an efficient steganographic scheme to hide data over gray scale images. This scheme is based on the property of the human eye, which is more sensitive to the change in the smooth area than the edge area using pixel value difference, besides employing the LSB substitution technique as a fundamental stage. The experimental results show that the proposed method could successfully achieve the goals of the high embedding capacity and maintaining the visual quality, in addition, provides more secure data hiding using selective pixel positions determined by a secret image (i.e. key). Moreover, based on that, the secret message is replaced with dynamic LSBs, our scheme can effectively resist several image steganalysis techniques.

Untitled

“…It is the most common method of steganography. It is simple and it can provide a high capacity by allowing information to be inserted into all of the pixels of the cover image, however, humans may notice when information is embedded in a smooth area of the image [16][17][18].…”

“…The PVD focuses on concealing information in the edge area to increase the security without considering the possibility of increasing the amount of hidden information [18]. The LSB method can provide more capacity while the PVD method can provide more security.…”

“…A new technique was proposed based on the security of PVD and capacity of LSB [18] This approach increased the amount of hidden information by inserting more in the pixels in the outer area and increased the security by inserting less in the smooth area.…”

Multi-level Steganography System Using Wavelet Transform

“…An information hiding system is characterized by having three different aspects that contend with each other as shown in Figure 1, capacity, security, and robustness. Capacity refers to the amount of data bits that can be hidden in the cover medium, and robustness is concerned about the amount of modification the stego medium can resist before an adversary can modify or destroy the hidden information [4] and security relates to the ability of an eavesdropper to detect the hidden information easily. Even if an attacker realizes the existence of the information in the stego object it should be impossible for the attacker to detect the information.…”

“…The closer the stego image to the cover image, the higher the security [2,3]. Although all digital file formats can be used for steganography, but the image and video files are more suitable because of their high degree of redundancy [4].…”