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High payload image steganography with reduced distortion using octonary pixel pairing scheme

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Abstract

The crucial challenge that decides the success of any steganographic algorithm lies in simultaneously achieving the three contradicting objectives namely—higher payload capacity, with commendable perceptual quality and high statistical un-detectability. This work is motivated by the interest in developing such a steganographic scheme, which is aimed for establishing secure image covert channel in spatial domain using Octonary PVD scheme. The goals of this paper are to be realized through: (1) pairing a pixel with all of its neighbors in all the eight directions, to offer larger embedding capacity (2) the decision of the number of bits to be embedded in each pixel based on the nature of its region and not done universally same for all the pixels, to enhance the perceptual quality of the images (3) the re-adjustment phase, which sustains any modified pixel in the same level in the stego-image also, where the difference between a pixel and its neighbor in the cover image belongs to, for imparting the statistical un-detectability factor. An extensive experimental evaluation to compare the performance of the proposed system vs. other existing systems was conducted, on a database containing 3338 natural images, against two specific and four universal steganalyzers. The observations reported that the proposed scheme is a state-of-the-art model, offering high embedding capacity while concurrently sustaining the picture quality and defeating the statistical detection through steganalyzers.

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Acknowledgements

This paper is based upon work supported by the All India Council for Technical Education - Research Promotion Scheme under Grant No. 20/AICTE/RIFD/RPS(POLICY-II)65/2012-13.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Information Technology, Thiagarajar College of Engineering, Madurai, India

    S. Geetha

  2. P.S.R.Rengasamy College of Engineering, Sivakasi, India

    C. Balasubramanian

  3. G.K.M. College of Engineering, Chennai, India

    S. Selvakumar

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  1. C. Balasubramanian
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  2. S. Selvakumar
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  3. S. Geetha
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Correspondence to S. Geetha.

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Balasubramanian, C., Selvakumar, S. & Geetha, S. High payload image steganography with reduced distortion using octonary pixel pairing scheme. Multimed Tools Appl 73, 2223–2245 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-013-1640-4

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