Information hiding is an ancient art of embedding private messages in seemingly innocuous messages in such a way that prevents the detection of the secret messages by a third parity. Whereas the goal of a secure cryptographic method is to prevent an interceptor from gaining any information about the plaintext encrypted, the goal of a secure steganographic method is to prevent an observant from even obtaining knowledge of the presence of the secret data. So, if we combine encryption with steganography we achieve even more security. This work presents a new method for embedding grayscale image in the spatial domain. The main objective of the proposed embedding module is to correct the statistical properties of the stego-image as well as improving its visual properties. This paper presents the “Improving Visual and Statistical Properties (IVSP)” technique, which improves the visual properties of the stego-image by considering two components, namely Minimum Error Replacement (MER) which minimises the embedding induced error, and Improved Grayscale Compensation (IGSC) that eliminates the false contours. It improves the statistical properties of the stegoimage by restoring the correlation of the zero and the ones in the images. Also, it eliminates the quantisation error introduced by JPEG image format. Moreover, one of the cryptographic and compression protocols can be involved in the proposed method to enhance security.
BT - Information & Security: An International Journal DA - 2013 IS - 2 LA - eng N2 -Information hiding is an ancient art of embedding private messages in seemingly innocuous messages in such a way that prevents the detection of the secret messages by a third parity. Whereas the goal of a secure cryptographic method is to prevent an interceptor from gaining any information about the plaintext encrypted, the goal of a secure steganographic method is to prevent an observant from even obtaining knowledge of the presence of the secret data. So, if we combine encryption with steganography we achieve even more security. This work presents a new method for embedding grayscale image in the spatial domain. The main objective of the proposed embedding module is to correct the statistical properties of the stego-image as well as improving its visual properties. This paper presents the “Improving Visual and Statistical Properties (IVSP)” technique, which improves the visual properties of the stego-image by considering two components, namely Minimum Error Replacement (MER) which minimises the embedding induced error, and Improved Grayscale Compensation (IGSC) that eliminates the false contours. It improves the statistical properties of the stegoimage by restoring the correlation of the zero and the ones in the images. Also, it eliminates the quantisation error introduced by JPEG image format. Moreover, one of the cryptographic and compression protocols can be involved in the proposed method to enhance security.
PY - 2013 SE - 58 SP - 58 EP - 78 T2 - Information & Security: An International Journal TI - A New Technique for Enhancing the Properties of Transmitted Data VL - 26 ER -