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Keyless dynamic optimal multi-bit image steganography using energetic pixels

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Abstract

Steganography plays an important role to hide data in apparently innocuous media (e.g., image, audio, video, text, etc.). Since most of the steganographic algorithms do not consider the image content while locating the message bearing pixels, in most occasions, they are bound to defeat against visual, structural and statistical attacks. We distribute the message bits in selective parts of a cover image, particularly in the ‘busy’ part, i.e., where a perceptible change in the pixel intensity occurs, using a variety of embedding schemes. The energetic pixels, as per our definition, capture this notion of ‘busy’ part of the image and our data hiding schemes keep the energy function invariant between the cover image and its stego version for lossless data extraction. The schemes do not need to share any key/seed or a pass-phrase between the sender and the receiver. We show that our proposed algorithms provide imperceptible visual distortions for embedding data at most 4 bits per pixels with high embedding efficiencies and can withstand popular first order statistical tests.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Cryptology and Security Research Unit (CSRU), R. C. Bose Centre for Cryptology and Security, Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata, 700 108, India

    Goutam Paul

  2. Department of Computer Science, University of California, Davis, CA, 95616, USA

    Ian Davidson

  3. Department of Computer Science & Engineering, St. Thomas’ College of Engineering & Technology, Kolkata, 700 023, India

    Imon Mukherjee

  4. Department of Computer Science, University at Albany, Suny, NY, 12222, USA

    S. S. Ravi

Authors
  1. Goutam Paul
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  2. Ian Davidson
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  3. Imon Mukherjee
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  4. S. S. Ravi
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Goutam Paul.

Additional information

This is a substantially revised and extended version of the paper [24] . This generalizes the single-bit per pixel (least significant bit (LSB)) based embedding of [24] to multi-bit, i.e., up to 4 bits per pixel. Thus, [24] may be considered a very special case of the current work. Sections 4 and 6 are new technical contributions in this paper. Moreover, Section 5 has been thoroughly updated to add analysis for multiple bits instead of only the LSB. Analysis of bitplanes was not performed in [24]. However, this has been done in the current work and the summary of the analysis is presented in the form of a new table, namely, Table 3. Theorem 5 related to the monotonicity of the number of non-zero energetic pixels is a new addition. Analysis of optimal choice of number of bits to be embedded per pixel and optimal capacity are also completely new contributions in the current version. Further, resistance against structural attacks was missing from [24] and has been added here in Section 5.3. We theoretically derive the expressions for embedding efficiency of our schemes and show that it is higher than many other schemes. This was absent in [24].

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Paul, G., Davidson, I., Mukherjee, I. et al. Keyless dynamic optimal multi-bit image steganography using energetic pixels. Multimed Tools Appl 76, 7445–7471 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-016-3319-0

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-016-3319-0

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