A design and analysis of LSB image steganography scheme using bit swapping approach in spatial domain

• Main Author: Mustafa Muneeb Taher, Mr.
• Format: text::Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: 2023
• Subjects: A design and analysis of LSB image steganography scheme

A foremost priority in the information technology and communication era is achieving an effective and secure steganography scheme when considering information hiding. Developing such a scheme for hiding a secret message should ideally disguise the hidden data well within transmission media. Pressing challenges in the context of a steganography system include security, imperceptibility, and capacity issues. Most researchers have highlighted the trade-offs between these issues. While, the trade-offs between payload and security have been neglected by researchers, as fixing one issue has been indicated to affect the other, and vice versa. Towards overcoming the aforementioned issues, an effective scheme has been proposed for image steganography, known as a bit swapping approach (BSA). The BSA is used to improve the contributions of the proposed scheme. Three main stages were used to achieve objectives in this research, beginning with image and text preparation, followed by embedding and culminating in extraction. Finally, the evaluation stage employed several evaluations to benchmark results. A standard database from the Signal and Image Processing Institute (SIPI) containing color and grayscale images with 512 x 512 pixels were utilized in this study. Different parameters were used to test the performance of the proposed scheme based on security and imperceptibility (image quality). In image quality, three important measurements used are Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR), Structural Similarity Index (SSIM), and Histogram analysis. At the same time, two security measurements used are Human Visual System (HVS) and Chi-square (X2) attacks. Based on the findings, the proposed scheme gives evidence to increase capacity, imperceptibility, and security to overcome existing issues.