Digital Image Cryptosystem With Adaptive Steganography
Digital Image Cryptosystem With Adaptive Steganography
Digital Image Cryptosystem With Adaptive Steganography
OF
AGRICULTURE AND TECHNOLOGY
INSTITUTE OF COMPUTER SCIENCE AND INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY
BSc COMPUTER TECHNOLOGY
Literature Review
On
DIGITAL IMAGE CRYPTOSYSTEM WITH ADAPTIVE
STEGANOGRAPHY
NAME
REG NO:
CS 282-0782/2009
SUPERVISORS:
DR. OKEYO
MR. J WAINAINA
DECLARATION
I declare that all materials presented here are my own original work, or fully and specifically
acknowledged wherever adapted from other sources. The work has not been submitted
previously, in whole or in part, to qualify for any academic award. The content of the thesis is the
result of work which has been carried out since the official approval of my proposal.
Contents
DECLARATION.............................................................................................................................ii
LIST OF FIGURES.........................................................................................................................v
LIST OF TABLES...........................................................................................................................v
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS............................................................................................................vi
ABSTRACT..................................................................................................................................vii
CHAPTER ONE..............................................................................................................................1
INTRODUCTION........................................................................................................................1
1.1 BACKGROUND....................................................................................................................2
A Steganographic Framework...................................................................................................2
1.2 STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM......................................................................................4
1.3 OBJECTIVES OF THE STUDY...........................................................................................6
1.4.1 Specific Objectives..........................................................................................................6
1.4 RESEARCH QUESTIONS....................................................................................................7
CHAPTER TWO.............................................................................................................................8
2.0 LITERATURE REVIEW.......................................................................................................8
2.1 Spatial Domain..................................................................................................................8
2.2 Transform Domain............................................................................................................10
2.3 EXISTING ATTACKS......................................................................................................11
2.3.1 Steganalysis....................................................................................................................11
2.3.1.1 Targeted Attacks..........................................................................................................12
2.3.1.2 Blind Attacks...............................................................................................................14
2.3 STATISTICAL RESTORATION.........................................................................................17
3
Introduction.............................................................................................................................17
2.3.1 Embedding by Pixel.......................................................................................................18
Algorithm Pixel Swap Embedding.........................................................................................19
2.3.1.1 Security Analysis.........................................................................................................20
2.3.1.2 New Statistical Restoration Scheme...........................................................................21
2.4 Mathematical Formulation of Proposed scheme..................................................................22
2.4.2 Restoration with Minimum Restoration.........................................................................25
2.4.3 Security Analysis............................................................................................................26
2.4.3.1 Analysis.......................................................................................................................26
2.5 SPATIAL DESYNCHRONIZATION..................................................................................27
2.5.1 Introduction....................................................................................................................27
2.5.2 Calibration Attack..........................................................................................................28
2.6 Counter Measures to Blind Steganalysis..........................................................................29
2.6.1 Spatial Block Desynchronization...................................................................................30
2.7 The Proposed Algorithm.......................................................................................................31
2.8 CONCLUSION AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS.................................................................36
2.8.1 Conclusion.....................................................................................................................36
2.8.2 Future Directions............................................................................................................37
2.9 PROJECT SCHEDULE.......................................................................................................38
3.0 RESEARCH BUDGET........................................................................................................39
REFERENCES..............................................................................................................................40
LIST OF FIGURES
FIGURE 1.4 FRAMEWORKS
FIGURE 2.1, TRADE-OFF
FOR
UNDETECTABILITY
AND
FIGURE 3.1: A
OF
J5 ALGORITHM...........32
LIST OF TABLES
TABLE 1: P-VALUE
TABLE 2: P-VALUE
OF
OF
23 DCA...............................................34
FOR
FOR
274 DCA..............................................35
J5
The Proposed Algorithm that uses Spatial Desynchronization for Low Detection
QIM
SDSA
YASS
23 DCA
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
It is with great reverence that I wish to express my deep gratitude towards Mr. J. Wainaina for his
astute guidance, constant motivation and trust, without which this work would never have been
possible. I am sincerely indebted to him for his constructive criticism and suggestions for
improvement at various stages of the work. I would also like to thank Madam Ann Kibe,
Research Scholar, for her guidance, invaluable suggestions and for bearing with me during the
thought provoking discussions which made this work possible. I am also thankful to Dr. Okeyo,
for clearing some of my doubts through email. I am grateful to my parents and brother for their
perennial inspiration. Last but not the least; I would like to thank all my seniors, friends and my
classmates especially Ben, Lenny and Mercy for making my stay at JKUAT comfortable and a
fruitful learning experience.
Signed..
Supervisor
Date______________
ABSTRACT
CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
Since the rise of the Internet one of the most important factors of information technology and
communication has been the security of information. Everyday tons of data are transferred
through the Internet through e-mail, file sharing sites, social networking sites etc. to name a few.
As the number of Internet users rises, the concept of Internet security has also gain importance.
The fiercely competitive nature of the computer industry forces web services to the market at a
breakneck pace, leaving little or no time for audit of system security, while the tight labour
market causes Internet project development to be staffed with less experienced personnel, who
may have no training in security. This combination of market pressure, low unemployment, and
rapid growth creates an environment rich in machines to be exploited, and malicious users to
exploit those machines.
Due to the fast development of communication technology, it is convenient to acquire
multimedia data. Unfortunately, the problem of illegal data access occurs every time and
everywhere. Hence, it is important to protect the content and the authorized use of multimedia
data against the attackers. Data encryption is a strategy to make the data unreadable, invisible or
incomprehensible during transmission by scrambling the content of data.
In an image cryptosystem, it uses some reliable encryption algorithms or secret keys to transform
or encrypt secret images into ciphered images. Only the authorized users can decrypt secret
images from the ciphered images. The ciphered images are meaningless and non-recognizable
for any unauthorized users who grab them without knowing the decryption algorithms or the
secret keys according to (Bhattacharyya, Banerjee, & Sanyal, 2011)Steganographys niche in
security is to supplement cryptography, not replace it. If a hidden message is encrypted, it must
also be decrypted if discovered, which provides another layer of protection.
Dissimilarly, steganographic techniques refer to methods of embedding secret data into cover
data in such a way that people cannot discern the existence of the hidden data. The image
steganographic methods (or called virtual image cryptosystems) are proposed to hide the secret
1
images into readable but non-critical cover images. They are designed to reduce the notice of
illegal users. Common methods for data hiding can be categorized into spatial and transform
domain methods. In the spatial domain, information hiding is an emerging research area, which
encompasses applications such as copyright protection for digital media, watermarking,
fingerprinting, and steganography.
In watermarking applications, the message contains information such as owner identification and
a digital time stamp, which usually applied for copyright protection.
Fingerprint, the owner of the data set embeds a serial number that uniquely identifies the user of
the data set. This adds to copyright information to makes it possible to trace any unauthorized
use of the data set back to the user.
Steganography hide the secret message within the host data set and presence imperceptible and is
to be reliably communicated to a receiver. The host data set is purposely corrupted, but in a
covert way, designed to be invisible to an information analysis.
1.1 BACKGROUND
A Steganographic Framework
Any steganographic system can be studied as shown in Figure 1.4. For a steganographic
algorithm having a stego-key, given any cover image the embedding process generates a stego
image. The extraction process takes the stego image and using the shared key applies the inverse
algorithm to extract the hidden message. This system can be explained using the prisoners
problem (Figure 1.4) where Alice and Bob are two inmates who wish to communicate in order
to hatch an escape plan. However communication between them is examined by the warden,
Wendy. To send the secret message to Bob, Alice embeds the secret message m into the cover
object c, to obtain the stego object s. The stego object is then sent through the public channel.
In a pure steganographic framework, the technique for embedding the message is unknown to
Wendy and shared as a secret between Alice and Bob. In private key steganography Alice and
Bob share a secret key which is used to embed the message. The secret key, for example, can be
2
a password used to seed a pseudo-random number generator to select pixel locations in an image
cover-object for embedding the secret message. Wendy has no knowledge about the secret key
that Alice and Bob share, although she is aware of the algorithm that they could be employing for
embedding messages. In public key steganography, Alice and Bob have private-public key pairs
and know each others public key. In this thesis we confine ourselves to private key
steganography only.
Figure 2.1, Trade-off between embedding capacity, Undetectability and robustness in data
hiding
One of the possible ways of categorizing the present steganalytic attacks is on the following two
categories;1. Visual Attacks: These methods try to detect the presence of information by visual
inspection either by the naked eye or by a computer. The attack is based on guessing the
embedding layer of an image (say a bit plane) and then visually inspecting that layer to
look for any unusual modifications in that layer.
2. Statistical Attacks: These methods use first or higher order statistics of the image to
reveal tiny alterations in the statistical behavior caused by steganographic embedding and hence
can successfully detect even small amounts of embedding with very high accuracy. These class
of steganalytic attacks are further classified as Targeted Attacks or Blind Attacks as
explained in detail in the next few sections.
CHAPTER TWO
2.1
Spatial Domain
These techniques use the pixel gray levels and their color values directly for encoding the
message bits. These techniques are some of the simplest schemes in terms of embedding and
extraction complexity. The major drawback of these methods is amount of additive noise that
creeps in the image which directly affects the Peak Signal to Noise Ratio and the statistical
properties of the image. Moreover these embedding algorithms are applicable mainly to lossless
image compression schemes like TIFF images. For lossy compression schemes like JPEG, some
of the message bits get lost during the compression step.
The most common algorithm belonging to this class of techniques is the Least Significant Bit
(LSB) Replacement technique in which the least significant bit of the binary representation of the
pixel gray levels is used to represent the message bit. This kind of embedding leads to an
addition of a noise of 0.5p on average in the pixels of the image where p is the embedding rate in
bits/pixel. This kind of embedding also leads to an asymmetry and a grouping in the pixel gray
values (0, 1) ;( 2, 3). . . (254,255). this asymmetry is exploited in the attacks developed for this
technique as explained further in section 2.2. To overcome this undesirable asymmetry, the
decision of changing the least significant bit is randomized i.e. if the message bit does not match
the pixel bit, then pixel bit is either increased or decreased by 1. This technique is popularly
known as LSB Matching. It can be observed that even this kind of embedding adds a noise of
0.5p on average. To further reduce the noise, (Zhang, Zhang, & Wang, 2007) have suggested the
8
use of a binary function of two cover pixels to embed the data bits. The embedding is performed
using a pair of pixels as a unit, where the LSB of the first pixel carries one bit of information,
and a function of the two pixel values carries another bit of information. It has been shown that
embedding in this fashion reduces the embedding noise introduced in the cover signal.
In (Bhattacharyya et al., 2011), a multiple base number system has been employed for
embedding data bits. While embedding, the human vision sensitivity has been taken care of. The
variance value for a block of pixels is used to compute the number base to be used for
embedding. A similar kind of algorithm based on human vision sensitivity has been proposed by
(, Condell, Curran, & Kevitt, 2010) by the name of Pixel Value Differencing. This approach is
based on adding more amount of data bits in the high variance regions of the image for example
near the edges by considering the difference values of two neighboring pixels. This approach
has been improved further by clubbing it with least significant bit embedding in (Budiman,
2010).
According to (Fridrich, 2012), For a given medium, the steganographic algorithm which makes
fewer embedding changes or adds less additive noise will be less detectable as compared to an
algorithm which makes relatively more changes or adds higher additive noise. Following the
same line of thought Crandall (Crandall, 1998) have introduced the use of an Error Control
Coding technique called Matrix Encoding. In Matrix Encoding, q message bits are embedded
in a group of 2q 1 cover pixels while adding a noise of 1 2q per group on average. The
maximum embedding capacity that can be achieved is 2q1. For example, 2 bits of secret
message can be embedded in a group of 3 pixels while adding a noise of 0.75 per group on
average. The maximum embedding capacity achievable is 2/3 = 0.67 bits/pixel. F5 algorithm (
et al., 2010)is probably the most popular implementation of Matrix Encoding.
LSB replacement technique has been extended to multiple bit planes as well. Recently (Science
& Goel, 2008) has claimed that LSB replacement involving more than one least significant bit
planes is less detectable than single bit plane LSB replacement. Hence the use of multiple bit
planes for embedding has been encouraged. But the direct use of 3 or more bit planes leads to
addition of considerable amount of noise in the cover image. And (Science & Goel, 2008) have
9
given a detailed analysis of the noise added by the LSB embedding in 3 bit planes. Also, a new
algorithm which uses a combination of Single Digit Sum Function and Matrix Encoding has
been proposed. It has been shown analytically that the noise added by the proposed algorithm in
a pixel of the image is 0.75p as compared to 0.875p added by 3 plane LSB embedding where p is
the embedding rate. One point to be observed here is that most of the approaches proposed so far
are based on minimization of the noise embedded in the cover by the algorithm. Another
direction of steganographic algorithm is preserving the statistics of the image which get changed
due to embedding. This research paper proposes two algorithms based on this approach itself. In
the next section we cover some of the transform domain steganographic algorithms.
coefficients to the nearest data bit. It also uses Matrix Encoding for reducing the embedded noise
in the signal. F5 is one the most popular embedding schemes in DCT domain steganography,
though it has been successfully broken in (Science & Goel, 2008).
The transform domain embedding does not necessarily mean generating the transform
coefficients on blocks of size 8 8 as done in JPEG compression techniques. It is possible to
design techniques which take the transforms on the whole image. Other block based JPEG
domain and wavelet based embedding algorithms have been proposed in (Westfeld & Wolf,
1998) .
11
The steganalytic attacks developed till date can be classified into visual and statistical attacks.
The statistical attacks can further be classified as;1. Targeted Attacks
2. Blind Attacks
Each of these classes of attack is covered in detail in the next two subsections along with several
examples of each category.
Histogram Analysis: The histogram analysis method exploits the asymmetry introduced
by LSB replacement. The main idea is to look for statistical artifacts of embedding in the
histogram of a given image. It has been observed statistically that in natural images
12
this artifact a statistical attack based on the Chi-Square Hypothesis Testing is developed to
probabilistically suggest one of the following two hypotheses:
Null Hypothesis H 0: The given image contains steganographic embedding
Alternative Hypothesis H 1: The given image does not contain steganographic embedding
The decision to accept or reject the Null Hypothesis H0 is made on basis of the observed
confidence value p. A more detailed discussion on Histogram Analysis can be found in ( et al.,
2010).
2
Sample Pair Analysis: Sample Pair Analysis is another LSB steganalysis technique that
can detect the existence of hidden messages that are randomly embedded in the least
significant bits of natural continuous-tone images. It can precisely measure the length of
the embedded message, even when the hidden message is very short relative to the image
size. The key to this methods success is the formation of 4 subsets of pixels (X, Y , U,
and V ) whose cardinalities change with LSB embedding (as shown in Figure 2.1), and
such changes can be precisely quantified under the assumption that the embedded bits are
randomly scattered. A detailed analysis on Sample Pair technique can be found in
(Petitcolas, Anderson, & Kuhn, 1999). Another attack called RS Steganalysis based on
the same concept has been independently proposed by (Kodovsk & Fridrich, 2009).
HCF-COM based Attack: This attack first proposed by (Harmsen & Pearlman, n.d.) is
based on the Center of Mass (COM) of the Histogram Characteristic Function (HCF) of
an image. This attack was further extended for LSB Matching by (Ker, 2007). This attack
observes the COM of a cover/stego image (C(HC)/C(HS)) and its calibrated version
obtained by down sampling the image (C(HC (HC) C (HC)
13
Wavelet Moment Analysis (WAM): Wavelet Moment Analyzer (WAM) is the most
popular Blind Steganalyzer for Spatial Domain Embedding. It has been proposed by
(Goljan, Fridrich, & Holotyak, 2011). WAM uses a de-noising filter to remove Gaussian
noise from images under the assumption that the stego image is an additive mixture of a
non-stationary Gaussian signal (the cover image) and a stationary Gaussian signal with a
known variance (the noise).
Figure 5.1: Calibration of the stego image for cover statistics estimation
As the filtering is performed in the wavelet domain, all the features (statistical moments) are
calculated as higher order moments of the noise residual in the wavelet domain. The detailed
procedure for calculating the WAM features in a gray scale image can be found in (Goljan et al.,
2011). WAM is based on a 27 dimension feature space. It then uses a Fisher Linear Discriminant
14
(FLD) as a classifier. It must be noted that WAM is a state of the art steganalyzer for Spatial
Domain Embedding and no other blind attack has been reported which performs better than
WAM.
Calibration Based Attacks: The calibration based attacks estimate the cover image
statistics by nullifying the impact of embedding in the cover image. These attacks were
first proposed by (Fridrich, 2012) And are designed for JPEG domain steganographic
schemes. They estimate the cover image statistics by a process termed as Self Calibration.
The steganalysis algorithms based on this self-calibration process can detect the presence
of steganographic noise with almost 100% accuracy even for very low embedding rates
( et al., 2010). This calibration is done by decompressing the stego JPEG image to
spatial domain and cropping 4 rows from the top and 4 columns from the left and
recompressing the cropped image as shown in Figure 2.2. The cropping and subsequent
recompression produces a calibrated image with most macroscopic features similar to
the original cover image. The process of cropping by 4 pixels is an important step
because the 8 8 grid of recompression does not see the previous JPEG compression
and thus the obtained DCT coefficients are not influenced by previous quantization (and
embedding) in the DCT domain.
Farids Wavelet Based Attack: This attack was one of the first blind attacks to be proposed in steganographic research (Lyu & Farid, n.d.) for JPEG domain steganography. It
is based on the features drawn from the wavelet coefficients of an image. This attack first
makes an n level wavelet decomposition of an image and computes four statistics namely
Mean, Variance, Skewness and Kurtosis for each set of coefficients yielding a total of 12
(n 1) coefficients. The second set of statistics is based on the errors in an optimal
linear predictor of coefficient magnitude. It is from this error that additional statistics i.e.
the mean, variance, skewness, and kurtosis are extracted thus forming a 24 (n 1)
dimensional feature vector. For implementation purposes, n is set to 4 i.e. four level
decomposition on the image is performed for extraction of features. The source code of
this attack is available at (FARID). After extraction of features, a Support Vector Machine
(SVM) is used for classification.
15
16
Introduction
In steganographic research several algorithms have been proposed for preserving statistical
features of the cover for achieving more security. Provos Outguess algorithm ( et al.,
2010)was an early attempt at histogram compensation for LSB hiding, while Eggers et al
(Science & Goel, 2008) have suggested a more rigorous approach to the same end, using
histogram-preserving data-mapping (HPDM) and adaptive embedding respectively. Solanki
proposed a statistical restoration method for converting the stego image histogram into the cover
histogram. This algorithm is based on a theorem proved by R Tzschoppe, R. Buml and J J.
Eggers which tries to convert one vector x into another vector y while satisfying a Minimum
Mean Square Error (MMSE) criterion. The algorithm considers the stego image histogram as
source vector x and tries to convert it into the cover image histogram i.e. the target vector y. All
17
the bins of the source histogram are compensated by mapping the input data with values in
increasing order.
This algorithm suffers from the following limitations:
1. The algorithm assumes the cover image to be a Gaussian cover and does not give good results
for non-Gaussian cover images.
2. The algorithm ignores low probability image regions for embedding due to erratic behavior in
low probability tail.
3. The algorithm has been tried specifically for Quantization Index Modulation algorithm
(Solanki, Dabeer, Madhow, Manjunath, & Chandrasekaran, 2009)and it has not been tested for
some well-known embedding schemes like LSB Replacement, LSB matching etc.
To overcome the above limitations we propose two algorithms for preserving the cover image
statistics after embedding. The first algorithm is designed to inherently preserve the first order
statistics during embedding itself. The algorithm makes an explicit attempt at restoring the cover
image histogram after embedding. These algorithms are discussed in detail in the next two
sections.
18
be embedded by making the value of first pixel lesser than the second pixel. The algorithm is
discussed formally in the next subsection.
19
order statistics. One important point to be observed here is that the threshold used in the
algorithm directs the tradeoff between the embedding rate and the noise introduced in the cover
signal. The noise added shall be limited as long as is kept small. We tested the algorithm for
= 2 and = 5 i.e. effectively we are making modifications to the Least Significant Planes of
the pixel gray level but without changing the bin value of the two gray values. The achievable
embedding rate would be high for images having low variance than for images having high
variance as the number of pixel pairs satisfying the condition in Step 2 of the PSE algorithm
would be higher in the former case than in the latter case.
20
21
22
of pixels available for compensation. So a tradeoff has to be sought between the embedding rate
and restoration percentage in order to get the optimum embedding procedure. For better
understanding of the algorithm some definitions are described next. Let the cover image, stego
image (i.e. embedded but not yet compensated) and compensated stego image (stego image after
compensation) be defined by C, S and R respectively. Suppose Cij, Sij and Rij represent the (i, j)
the pixel of C, S and R images respectively (0 < i < m, 0 < j < n, m is number of rows and n is
number of columns of image matrices).
Embed Matrix (): It is a m n characteristic matrix representing whether a pixel has been used
for embedding or not.
If (i, j) Th pixel is used for embedding
(i, j)
(3, 1)
If (i, j) Th pixel is not used for embedding
i.
Compensation Vector (): It is a one dimensional vector with length L where L is number
of existing gray levels in the cover image (C). (k) = u means that u number of pixels
ii.
23
24
Equation 1
Where ^h (i) and h (i) is the histogram of the stego and cover images respectively. L - 1 is
the no. of bins in the histogram. Ki (0 _ Ki _ L - 1) is a bin that is used to repair at least
one unit of data in ith bin.
- Ki) <=L - 1. _ is
Equation 2
Example 2: The total noise () added by the SRA algorithm is minimum if maximum noise per
pixel due to embedding is 1other steganographic scheme where noise added during embedding
per pixel is at most 1), the proposed scheme increments or decrements gray value by 1 i.e.
abs(iKi) = 1.
25
So from Example 1 and 2, we can conclude that the SRA algorithm adds minimum amount of
noise during restoration if maximum noise per pixel due to embedding is at most 1.
2.4.3.1 Analysis
The two new algorithms have been proposed which are able to preserve the first order statistics
of a cover image after embedding and thus making the data hiding process robust against first
order statistic based steganalytic attacks. Moreover the proposed SRA algorithm does not assume
any particular distribution for the cover image and hence gives better performance than existing
restoration scheme given in (Sullivan et al., 2006)especially for non-Gaussian covers. It must be
mentioned that preservation of only the marginal statistics does not increase the robustness of a
steganographic algorithm against blind steganalytic attacks as they are based on extremely high
order statistical moments which are sensitive to even small amounts of additive noise.
26
27
algorithms based on this self-calibration process can detect the presence of steganographic noise
with almost 100% accuracy even for very low embedding rates (Lyu & Farid, n.d.).
In this section, we propose a new steganographic framework called Spatial Block
Desynchronization which attempts to resist the calibration based steganalytic attacks by
preventing the successful prediction of the cover image statistics from the stego image. We also
introduce a new steganographic scheme called J5: Spatially Desynchronized Steganographic
Algorithm (SDSA) based on the same framework.
Where L1 represents the L1 NORM of the two feature vectors, i = 1, 2 23 and g are vector
functionals which are applied to both cover and cropped cover and stego and cropped stego
images. These functionals are the global DCT coefficient histogram, co-occurrence matrix,
spatial blockiness measures etc. The complete set of functionals can be found in (Fridrich, 2012)
28
29
Since the parameters of this attack i.e. the quality factor used for compression are known after
embedding, an iterative process of embedding and attacking is suggested so that the system
converges towards a low error rate. The suggested modifications have been able to improve the
embedding rate up to some extent while maintaining the same levels of security. But clearly the
iterative step of embedding and attacking increases the complexity of the algorithm. It will be
shown in the next few sections that the proposed scheme can achieve even higher embedding
rates at same levels of security. In the next subsection we introduce our concept of spatial block
desynchronization for resisting the blind steganalytic attacks.
2.6.1 Spatial Block Desynchronization
In the JPEG image format, an image is divided into non-overlapping blocks of size 88. The
information contained in these blocks is then compressed by taking the 2D Discrete Cosine
Transform of the block followed by quantization step which are then used for embedding data
bits. A slight alteration of this spatial block arrangement can desynchronize the whole image.
Such alteration of the spatial block arrangement of an image is termed as Spatial Block
Desynchronization. For example, 8 8 non overlapping blocks for embedding can be taken from
a subimage of the original cover image or we can say the block arrangement is slightly shifted
from standard JPEG compression block arrangement. A formal description of spatial block
desynchronization is given below.
Let I be a gray scale image of size (NN). A subimage of I can be obtained by removing u rows
from the top and v columns from left. Let us denote the cropped image by u; v is (N-u) (N-v).
Lets denote the cropped image u, v
u, v = I - u, v
Another
use a block
using
blocks of sizes m n
where m
8 and n 8. In such a
case, the
to be
changed accordingly to
size m n
embedding.
This desynchronization
can be
the help of
randomization. In this
case, the removal of rows and columns and also the sizes of the blocks can be chosen randomly
using a shared secret key. Also, the matrix Q can be a shared secret between the two
communicating parties. Since at the steganalysis stage the image statistics are derived using
blocks of sizes 88, the steganalyst is not able to capture effectively the modifications made
during the embedding process. Even if it is known that embedding has been done using blocks of
different sizes, it is difficult to track the portions of the image containing the embedded
information due to randomized hiding. It should be noted that once the quantized DCT
coefficients have been obtained, any JPEG steganographic scheme can be employed for
embedding. In the next section we explain a new steganographic scheme based on the concept of
spatial block desynchronization.
31
and Detection Accuracy. It has been found that proposed algorithm shows better results than
existing schemes in terms of detectability against calibration based steganalytic attacks.
The main aim of the proposed scheme is to embed data in a spatially desynchronized version of
the cover image so that the cover image statistics cannot be easily recovered from the stego
image. The cover image is desynchronized by the partitioning scheme discussed above. The
cropped version of the image u, v is used for steganographic embedding using any DCT domain
scheme. After embedding, this embedded portion of the image is stitched with I u, v to obtain the
stego image I s. The JPEG compressed version of Is is communicated as the stego image.
32
33
4. Apply dequantization and Inverse Discrete Cosine Transform (IDCT) to the set of blocks used
for embedding in Step 3.
5. Join I U, V with the resulting image obtained at Step 4. This combined image is the output stego
image IS which is compressed using JPEG compression and communicated as the stego image.
End Modified Spatially Desynchronised Steganographic Algorithm (MSDSA)
The MSDSA algorithm has been shown pictorially in Figure 6. Figure 6(a) above shows the
unmodified cover image from which the cropped image u, v portion is labeled as EFGH
In Figure 6(a). u, v (Figure 6(b)) is extracted. u, v is then divided into non overlapping blocks
size m n as shown by solid lines in Figure 4.4(c). A DCT domain steganographic scheme is
then applied to some of these blocks and u, v is finally attached with I u, v to obtain the stego
image s as shown in Figure 6(d).
Since the embedded image undergoes JPEG compression before being communicated to the
decoding end, some of the embedded data bits might get lost in the process because of the
quantization step during JPEG compression. This quantization loss occurs for almost all the DCT
domain embedding schemes. We try to circumvent this problem by embedding data mainly in the
low-frequency DCT coefficients. Also embedded data can be made secure by adding some
redundant bits in the data stream and using error-control coding techniques. This problem of
using error-control coding for securing the data bits has been addressed in (Solanki et al.,
2009)albeit at the cost of low embedding rate. We would like to mention here that in our
implementations of QIM, YASS and SDSA we have not included any error-control technique.
Lets compare the three schemes and verify our argument
Using Statistical Hypothesis
Embedding
QIM
YASS
J5:Low
Rate(bpnc )
p-value
p-value
detection
SDSA 8X8
0.05
2.1510-8
0.0042
34
p-value
0.1180
0.10
2.44 10-4
0.0065
0.25
1.121024
4.2310-6
0.50
7.5310-10
Embedding
QIM
YASS
J5:Low
Rate(bpnc )
p-value
p-value
detection
SDSA 8X8
0.05
0.1907
0.7947
p-value
0.8652
0.10
0.0059
0.6734
0.7853
0.25
1.02810-16
0.3170
0.5213
0.50
9.2710-6
0.3525
It can be seen that for all embedding rates the p-value of the SDSA algorithm is greater than the
p-value of both YASS and QIM scheme indicating that the SDSA algorithm generates a stego
image population which is statistically closer to the cover image population than the populations
generated by YASS and QIM. It should be noted that even though the p-values obtained are small
but for the purpose of comparison it is significantly higher for the proposed scheme than that of
QIM and YASS
35
36
37
38
39
DURATION
SEM I
MAY JUN
Proposal
Data Collection
Cryptosystem
JULY
modeling
4
Literature Review
Mini presentation
Results Analysis
Documentation
Final Presentation
40
AUG
SEM II
SEPT
OCT
NOV
DEC
Price in Kshs.
Desktop Computer
30,000
6,000
Internet
2,000
2,000
Soft wares
2,000
Miscellaneous Expenses
3,000
Total Cost
45,000
41
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Bhattacharyya, S., Banerjee, I., & Sanyal, G. (2011). A Survey of Steganography and
Steganalysis Technique in Image , Text , Audio and Video as Cover Carrier. (I. Banerjee,
Ed.)Journal of Global Research in Computer Science, 2(4).
Budiman, A. (2010). Steganography Application On Video With Least Significant Bit ( LSB )
METHOD.
C. Chen, Y.Q. Shi,W. Chen, and G. Xuan, Statistical moments based universal steganalysis
using JPEG-2D array and 2-D characteristic function, in Proc. Int. Conf. on Image
Processing, Atlanta, GA, USA, 8-11 Oct., 2006, pp. 105-108.
Crandall, R. (1998). Some Notes on Steganography.
Fridrich, J. (2012). Modern Steganalysis Can Detect YASS, 350.
Goljan, M., Fridrich, J., & Holotyak, T. (2011). New Blind Steganalysis and its Implications.
Harmsen, J. J., & Pearlman, W. A. (n.d.). Steganalysis of additive noise modelable information
hiding.
H. Farid, http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/farid/research/stegm (Code for generating waveletbased feature vectors for steganalysis.)
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J. Fridrich, and D. Soukal, Matrix Embedding for Large Payloads, IEEE Trans. on Information Forensics and Security, vol. 1, Sept. 2006, pp. 390-395
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Sullivan, K., Solanki, K., Manjunath, B. S., Madhow, U., & Chandrasekaran, S. (2006). S.
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Zhang, W., Zhang, X., & Wang, S. (2007). A Double Layered Plus-Minus One Data
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