Development of an Improved Pairwise Least Significant Bit Steganography using Immune Programming Approach

Habibu Rabiu, Stephen Nwachukwu

Abstract


Steganography is the science of secret communication i.e., hiding a secret message in a carrier file such as image, video or text. The goal of steganography is to conceal the presence of a message from unauthorized party. The challenge of modern image steganography is to transfer the embedded information to the destination without being detected and decoded by an attacker. Many different carrier file formats can be used, but digital images are the most popular because of their prevalence on the Internet. For hiding secret information in images, there exist a large variety of steganographic techniques some are more complex than others and all of them have their respective strengths and weaknesses. In this work, the conventional pairwise Least Significant Bit (lsb) algorithm is modified and merged with an Immune Programming Strategy to find a near optimal solution for masking the message thus, making it imperceptible and secured.  The result obtained revealed a low Mean Square Error (MSE) which implies minimal pixel differences between the original and stego images. In addition, the result also demonstrated a high Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR) which suggest sustenance of the image quality, thus less prone to hackers


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References


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