D. Saritha et al., International Journal of Research in Engineering, IT and Social Science, ISSN 2250-0588, Impact
Factor: 6.565, Volume 09, Special Issue 1, May 2019, Page 146-151
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A New Approach to Image Steganography using
Bit Plane Slicing and Convolution
D. SARITHA1, A. AJANTHA
2, A. MALLIKARJUN REDDY
3, J. NAVEEN
4, CH. ANJUSHA
5
1UG Scholar, Dept. of ECE, Narayana Engineering College, GUDUR, AP, India,
2UG Scholar, Dept. of ECE, Narayana Engineering College, GUDUR, AP, India,
3UG Scholar, Dept. of ECE, Narayana Engineering College, GUDUR, AP, India,
4UG Scholar, Dept. of ECE, Narayana Engineering College, GUDUR, AP, India,
5Associate Professor, Dept. of ECE, Narayana Engineering College, GUDUR, AP, India,
Abstract-- The novel algorithm is based on bit plane
slicing technique. The basic idea is to divide the
secret image into four parts and these four parts of
the secret image are then embedded into four
different cover images using a secret key to prevent
image intrusions or hacking. The four stego images
are then transmitted to the intended receiver. The
receiver receives four stego images which contains
four parts of the secret image. These four parts of
the image are then extracted using an algorithm and
a secret key which again works on bit operations.
The extracted images are then restructured to
reconstruct the original secret image. This algorithm
offers very low distortion between the actual image
and the reconstructed image with cross correlation
between two images being in the range 0.91 – 0.99
thus indicating very high image retrieval and at the
same time a secured transmission algorithm for
critical secret image transmission. The parameters
used to test the robustness of the algorithm are Mean
Square Error (MSE), Peak Signal to Noise Ratio
(PSNR) and Normalized Cross-Correlation.
Index Terms- Steganography, Stego image, Bit
Plane Slicing, Convolution, MSE, PSNR, Normalized
Cross Correlation.
I. INTRODUCTION
owadays most of the internet users need to store,
send or receive data. The common way to do this is
to transform the data into some unknown form.
The resulting data can be understood only by those who
know how to return it to its original form. This way of
protecting information is known as encryption. The
major drawback of encryption is the existence of data is
not hidden.
A. Steganography
Steganography[1]
is the art and science of invisible
communication. Steganography is a Greek word which
literally means “covered writing”. The word
steganography is divided into two words Steganos and
graphein, where Steganos means “hidden” or “covered”
and graphein means “to write”[2]
.
Steganography is the art and science of
communicating in a way which hides the existence of
the communication. Steganographic technologies are a
very important part of the future of Internet security and
privacy on open systems such as the Internet[3]
.
The main goal of steganography is to transmit the secret
image securely so that the third party cannot understand
the transmission of secret image.
Basic key words in steganography are
Payload: The information which is to be hidden.
Carrier File: The media where payload has to be
hidden.
Stego-Medium: The medium in which the
information is hidden.
Steganalysis: The process of detecting hidden
information inside of a file.
The message hidden in the selected media is transmitted
to recipient[4]
. At receiver end, reverse process is
implemented to recover the original message.
The basic steganography system[1]
scenario is as shown
below:
N
D. Saritha et al., International Journal of Research in Engineering, IT and Social Science, ISSN 2250-0588, Impact
Factor: 6.565, Volume 09, Special Issue 1, May 2019, Page 146-151
http://indusedu.org Page 147
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
Figure1: Steganography system scenario.
1. Steganography Types
There are basically three types of steganography
protocols used[3]
. They are
P
ure steganography
S
ecret key steganography
P
ublic key steganography
Pure steganography: In pure steganography system, the
secret key is not exchanged between the transmitter and
the receiver. This method of steganography is least
secured.
Secret key steganography: In secret key steganography
the secret key is exchanged between transmitter and
receiver prior to communication. The major advantage
of secret key steganography is that the parties who
know the secret key can extract the secret message.
Public key steganography: The Public Key
Steganography uses a public key and a private key to
secure the communication between the parties wanting
to communicate secretly. The sender uses the public key
during the embedding process and the private key,
which has a relationship with the public key, can extract
the secret message. Public key steganography provides
multiple levels of security.
B. Steganography verses cryptography
Both steganography and cryptography are closely
related. Cryptography scrambles the secret image that is
the secret image is transferred into an unknown format
which is not understandable[1]
. Whereas on the other
hand steganography hides the secret image in another
media so that there is no knowledge of existence of
secret image.
C. Data hiding
Data hiding is defined as a set of processes used to
embed secret data into various forms of media such as
text, audio, or image with minimum amount of
degradation to the original data[2]
.
1. Applications of Data Hiding
Important applications of data hiding in digital media
can be considered in terms of proof of the copyright and
content integrity assurance. Therefore, the secret data
should be kept hidden in the host image, even if there is
a possibility that the image is subjected to some
manipulation techniques[2]
. Another application is to
hide more data in a featured location.
2. Goals of Data Hiding
a) The secret image should be directly embedded into
the cover image.
b) The embedded data should be protected from
channel noise, cropping, filtering, lossy
compression etc.
D. Bit plane slicing
Image enhancement is the method of enhancing the
low contrast image. But the drawback of this method is
that all the pixels in the image are brightened totally and
this may not be suitable for some applications. So to
overcome this, Bit-Plane Slicing method[6]
is used. Bit-
Plane Slicing is a technique in which the image is sliced
at different planes.
The bit plane image corresponding to the plane of the
most significant bit (MSB) has the maximum
contribution to the total image and forms the majority of
the visually significant image data and planes
corresponding to other lower bit positions contribute
only the subtle details of the image.
It ranges from Bit level 0 which is the least significant
bit (LSB) to Bit level 7 which is the most significant bit
(MSB). The input to this method is an 8-bit per pixel
image. This is a very important method in Image
Processing[5]
.
Figure2: Bit Plane Slicing.
The advantage of this method is that it gives the relative
importance of each bit of the image. It also highlights
the contribution made by specific bits.
II. REQUIREMENTS
1. The cover image should be exactly half that of the
secret image that is if the secret image is of size
1024×768 then the size of the cover image should be
512×384.
2. To achieve better maximum PSNR and normalized
cross-correlation between the original secret image
and the extracted secret image.
III.
III. PROPOSED ALGORITHM
In this algorithm the secret image is divided into
four parts and these four parts of the secret image are
then embedded into four different cover images using a
secret key. The processed four images (stego images)
are then transmitted to the intended receiver. The
receiver receives four stego images which contains four
parts of the secret image. These four parts of the image
D. Saritha et al., International Journal of Research in Engineering, IT and Social Science, ISSN 2250-0588, Impact
Factor: 6.565, Volume 09, Special Issue 1, May 2019, Page 146-151
http://indusedu.org Page 148
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
are then extracted using an algorithm and a secret key
which works on bit operations. The extracted images are
then restructured to obtain the secret image.
A. Embedding process
The embedding process is as follows:
1. Select the secret image.
2. Divide the secret image into four parts.
3. Select four cover images. Cover images should be
exactly 1/2
that of the secret image.
a. Provide the secret key '4321' to execute the
program
4. Convolving the upper left part of the secret image
with that of the first cover image using Bit Plane
technique.
5. Write the convolution of upper left part with that of
cover image in a .bmp file to avoid any sort of loss in
lower bits.
6. Convolving the upper right part of secret image with
that of the second cover image using Bit Plane
technique.
7. Write the convolution of the upper right with that of
cover image in a .bmp file to avoid any sort of loss in
lower bits.
8. Convolving the lower left part of secret image with
that of the third cover image using Bit Plane
technique.
9. Write the convolution of the lower left part with that
of cover image in a .bmp file to avoid any sort of
loss in lower bits.
10. Convolving the lower right part of secret image with
that of the fourth cover image using Bit Plane
technique
11. Write the convolution of the lower right part with
that of cover image in a .bmp file to avoid any sort of
loss in lower bits.
12. End of embedding process.
1. Extracting process
The extracting process is as follows:
1. Select the four stego images obtained from the
embedding process.
2. P
rovide the secret key '1234' to perform the extraction
process.
3. T
he four stego images undergoes blind deconvolution
where the four parts of the secret image are
retrieved.
4. T
he four parts retrieved after deconvolution are
restructured to obtain the actual secret image.
B. RESULTS
Selecting the secret image as shown below.
Figure 3: Selecting the secret Image.
The selected secret image will be displayed as shown
below.
Figure 4: Selected secret Image.
The selected secret image is cropped into four parts as
shown below.
D. Saritha et al., International Journal of Research in Engineering, IT and Social Science, ISSN 2250-0588, Impact
Factor: 6.565, Volume 09, Special Issue 1, May 2019, Page 146-151
http://indusedu.org Page 149
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
Figure 5: Four parts of secret Image
The four cover images are selected as shown below.
Figure 6: Selecting cover images.
The selected four cover images are as shown below.
Figure 7: Selected four cover images.
Providing the secret key to embed the secret image parts
into selected cover images as shown below.
Figure 8: Providing the secret key for embedding process.
The four different stego images obtained after
embedding the four secret image parts in four cover
images are shown below.
Figure 9: Four stego images.
The four different stego images received at the receiver
are as shown below.
D. Saritha et al., International Journal of Research in Engineering, IT and Social Science, ISSN 2250-0588, Impact
Factor: 6.565, Volume 09, Special Issue 1, May 2019, Page 146-151
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Figure 10: Four received stego images.
Provide the secret key to extract the secret image parts
from the four different stego images as shown below.
Figure 11: Providing the secret key for extraction process.
The secret image parts extracted from the four different
stego images are as shown below.
Figure 12: Extracted secret image parts.
The extracted secret image parts are restructured to form
the original secret image as shown below.
Figure 13: Extracted secret image.
The obtained quality analysis parameters between the
original secret image and the retrieved secret image are
as shown below.
Figure 14: Quality analysis parameters.
C. SOFTWARE TOOL
Matlab R2013a
D. CONCLUSION
The proposed image steganography method gives
better security as the secret image is divided in 4 parts.
Hence to retrieve the secret image the receiver has to
use four stego images, thus if anyone tries to steal some
of the data they won’t be able to retrieve the image
unless they have all the four images. Further the secret
key used in the algorithm gives additional security in
the process hence eliminating any unauthorized viewing
of the message. The hidden image and the retrieved
image has a normalized cross correlation of 0.9306 thus
indicating a retrieval of 93.06% of the secret image
which indicates very high and efficient performance of
D. Saritha et al., International Journal of Research in Engineering, IT and Social Science, ISSN 2250-0588, Impact
Factor: 6.565, Volume 09, Special Issue 1, May 2019, Page 146-151
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
the algorithm. The algorithm uses very less memory for
computation and at the same time gives a good result in
very short time, thus indicating sensitivity and memory
efficient algorithm.
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