Improving embedding efficiency for digital steganography by exploiting similarities between secret and cover images

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel method for digital steganography that exploits similarities between secret and cover images to improve embedding efficiency, reduce distortion, and enhance robustness against steganalysis.

Contribution

It develops innovative image manipulation and data hiding schemes that increase similarities between secret and cover images, enabling more efficient and less detectable embedding.

Findings

Achieves higher embedding efficiency with minimal distortion.

Produces stego-images with good quality and robustness.

Outperforms existing methods against steganalysis tools.

Abstract

Digital steganography is becoming a common tool for protecting sensitive communications in various applications such as crime(terrorism) prevention whereby law enforcing personals need to remotely compare facial images captured at the scene of crime with faces databases of known criminals(suspects); exchanging military maps or surveillance video in hostile environment(situations); privacy preserving in the healthcare systems when storing or exchanging patient medical images(records); and prevent bank customers accounts(records) from being accessed illegally by unauthorized users. Existing digital steganography schemes for embedding secret images in cover image files tend not to exploit various redundancies in the secret image bit-stream to deal with the various conflicting requirements on embedding capacity, stego-image quality, and un-detectibility. This paper is concerned with the development of innovative image procedures and data hiding schemes that exploit, as well as increase, similarities between secret image bit-stream and the cover image LSB plane. This will be achieved in two novel steps involving manipulating both the secret and the cover images,prior to embedding, to achieve higher 0:1 ratio in both the secret image bit-stream and the cover image LSB plane. The above two steps strategy has been exploited to use a bit-plane(s) mapping technique, instead of bit-plane(s) replacement to make each cover pixel usable for secret embedding. This paper will demonstrate that this strategy produces stego-images that have minimal distortion, high embedding efficiency, reasonably good stego-image quality and robustness against 3 well-known targeted steganalysis tools.