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ABSTRACT
The big data era calls for image steganography with large embedding capacity and good image quality. Previous methods
described in the literature pay more attention to image quality rather than payload. This paper proposes a large capacity
steganographic method based on modication direction exploitation and pixel pair matching. By virtue of a reference
matrix with particular properties, one or two 9-ary digits can be embedded into each cover pixel pair depending on different
payloads. Experimental results demonstrate high embedding capacity as well as good image quality and security. Copyright
2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
KEYWORDS
steganography; modification direction exploiting; reference matrix; pixel pair matching
*Correspondence
Bin Luo, Anhui University, No.111 Jiulong Road, Hefei, 230601 China.
E-mail: Luobin_ahu@163.com
1. INTRODUCTION
As the exchange of information become more and more
extensive and important in society, the problem of
protecting this information from unintended and undesired
usage becomes more complex. With the development of
big data and cloud computing, the demand for information
security and privacy protection is increasingly strong.
Naturally, steganography and steganalysis techniques are
the subject of much current research focus [1,2]. The aim
of steganography is to hide the existence of information
within innocuous carriers, with the goal of modifying the
carrier in an imperceptible way, so that neither any
evidence of data hiding nor the existence of the embedded
data itself is revealed. A wide range of multimedia can be
used as information carriers, such as text [3], voice [4,5],
images [69], and video [10]. Amongst these carriers,
images are now the most commonly used covers because
they have a wide range of potential applications and images
contain a large quantity of redundant space that can potentially be exploited.
The image used to embed data is called the cover
image or cover, and it becomes known as the stegoimage after data have been embedded. Because there is
limitation to the sensitivity of human senses, very small
distortions in digital images cannot easily be identied. The
ultimate goal of image steganography is to embed as many
bits as possible (i.e., having a large embedding capacity)
2. PROPOSED METHOD
In this section, we describe the improved image steganographic method based on MDE in detail. A reference matrix M with particular properties has been designed and
can be generated with a base-9 numeral system function
at rst. Then, the potential of embedding directions in the
two-dimensional space of M can be explored and one or
two 9-ary digits can be embedded into each pixel pair by
virtue of the special properties of M. These properties are
dened in the succeeding discussions.
2.1. Denitions and properties
Denition 1. The notation M(x, y) is a reference to the value
that appears in column x and row y of the matrix M, and this
value M(x, y) can be calculated according to Equation (3),
using the parameters dened in Equations (1) and (2)
F x floorx=3
(1)
Rx; y x mod y
(2)
(4)
722
Security Comm. Networks 2016; 9:721728 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
DOI: 10.1002/sec
(5)
CE 1 Pi Pi Pi Pi ; Z 1g
CE 2 Pi Pi Pi Pi ; Z 4g
(6)
>
< Pi 9; Pi < 0;
(8)
Pi Pi 9; Pi > 255;
>
:
i f1; 2; ; mg
Step 4. For each cover pixel pair (Pi, Pj), i, j {m + 1, m
+ 2, , 2N m}, nd Pi ; Pj in CE1(Pi), CE1(Pj), which
satises Equation (9), and replace (Pi, Pj) with Pi ; Pj to
conceal di until {dm + 1, , dN} are all embedded.
8
>
< r i R Pi ; 3
r j RPj ; 3
(9)
>
:
di M ri ; rj
Step 5. Solve overow and underow according to
Equation (10).
8
Pi 3; Pi < 0;
>
<
Pi
(10)
Pi 3; Pi > 255;
>
:
ifm 1; m 2; ; 2N mg
Pi Pi ; if2N m 1; ; HW g.
Output. I P1 ; P2 ; ; PHW .
Step 6.
0;
N bHW=2c;
2N bHW=2c;
Otherwise:
Step 3.
Calculate (di, dj), i, j {1, 2, , m} by stego
pixel pair Pi ; Pj according to Equation (7) until {d1, d2,
, dm} are all extracted.
If m = 0, go to Step 4.
Step 2. For each cover pixel pair (Pi, Pj), i, j {1, 2, , m},
nd Pi ; Pj in CE2(Pi), CE2(Pj), which satises Equation
(7), and replace (Pi, Pj) with Pi ; Pj to conceal (di, dj), i,
j {1, 2, , m} until {d1, d2, , dm} are all embedded.
8
>
>
>
>
<
>
>
>
>
:
r i R Pi ; 9
rj
RPj ; 9
dj M ri ; rj
di M F r i ; F r j
Step 4.
Calculate di, i {m + 1, m + 2, , N} by stego
pixel pair (Pi, Pj), i, j {m + 1, m + 2, , 2N m} according
to Equation (9) until {dm + 1, , dN} are all extracted.
Output.
Security Comm. Networks 2016; 9:721728 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
DOI: 10.1002/sec
Data embedding:
Input. A cover image I sized 2 3 (shown in Figure 2(a))
and 9-ary data D = {1, 3, 7, 8} are used as inputs.
723
Step 1. m = 2 (N bH W/2c) = 2.
Step 2. For the cover pixel pair (P1, P2) = (100, 151) and
the two
digits (d1, d2) = (1, 3), according
to Equation (7),
P1 ; P2 can be calculated as P1 ; P2 99; 149; using
the candidate elements found in Equation (6):
CE 2 100 f96; 97; 98; 99; 100; 101; 102; 103; 104g;
CE2 151 f147; 148; 149; 150; 151; 152; 153; 154; 155g:
{d1, d2} = {1, 3} are then embedded
by
replacing the pixel
pair (P1, P2) = (100, 151) with P1 ; P2 99; 149.
Step 3. For the cover pixel pair (Pi, Pj), i, j {3, 4, 5, 6}, nd
Pi ; Pj in CE1(Pi), CE1(Pj), which satises Equation (9), and
replace (Pi, Pj) with Pi ; Pj to conceal one digit until {d
3,
d4} are both embedded. According to Equation (9), P3 ; P4
2; 0 could be found in CE1(2) = {1, 2, 3}, and CE1(0)
=
{1, 0, 1} to conceal d3 = 7. In addition,
P5 ; P6
254; 254 could be found in CE1(255) = {254, 255, 256}
and CE1(254) = {253, 254, 255} to conceal d4 = 8;
Output. The resulting output is the stego-image I, shown
in Figure 2(b).
Data extraction:
Input.
I P1 ; P2 ; ; PHW
f99; 149; 2; 1; 254; 254g, N = 4.
Step 1.
Generate reference matrix M according to
Equations (1)(3).
Step 2.
m = 2 (N bH W/2c) = 2.
Step 3.
According to Equation (7), {d1, d2} = {1, 3}
can be extracted from the stego pixel pair P1 ; P2
99; 149.
Step 4.
d3 = 7 can be extracted from
P
3 ; P4 2; 1
and d4 = 8 can be extracted from P5 ; P6 254; 254
according to Equation (9).
Output. D = {1, 3, 7, 8}.
3. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS
3.1. Image quality and embedding capacity
results
Nine commonly used grayscale images, each of dimensionality 512 512 pixels, were used in the experiments
reported in this section. For a stego-image, good visual
quality is necessary to ensure the imperceptibility of the
724
MSE
2552
MSE
dB
1 HW
I i I i
HW i1
(11)
(12)
where MSE (the Mean Square Error) represents the difference between a stego-image and the corresponding cover
image of size H W pixels.
Usually, a high PSNR value means high similarity and
less distortion between the stego-image and its original image. Generally speaking, it is hard for human eyes to distinguish the differences between a grayscale cover image
and the stego version with a PSNR value greater than
30 dB. Figure 3 shows the stego-images generated by the
proposed method with full payload, at 3.169 bpp.
As an example, Figure 4(a) shows the partial area of image Lena. Here, we use the original image (Figure 4(a)) to
compare the visual quality of the stego-images generated
by EMD [12], EMD-2 [14], and our new proposed method
when n = 2. Figure 4(b) shows the stego-image generated
by EMD with the maximum embedding rate of ER = 1.16
bpp. The PSNR of (b) is 52.11 dB, which is the best value
amongst all of the stego images (b)(d). Figure 4(c) is the
stego-image generated by EMD-2 with a maximum embedding rate of ER = 1.585 bpp and PSNR = 49.86 dB.
Figure 4(d) is generated by the method proposed in this paper with ER = 1.585 bpp. Its PSNR is 49.89 dB which is
similar to EMD-2.
In addition to the previous discussions, PSNR of different methods under the same payload are compared and are
shown in Figure 5. The performance curves clearly demonstrate that the PSNR of our proposed method is above
Sudoku-S, and even when the embedding rate is no more
than 1.585 bpp, has very similar performance to the LSBMR and EMD techniques. Compared with MSE, when
the payload is between 1.9 bpp and log25 bpp, the PSNR
of MSE is higher. But except for that, the proposed method
achieves better PSNR when the payload is no more than
1.8bpp. In terms of embedding capacity, the performance
curves show that our method is the best. The reason is as
follows. EMD embeds a B-ary digit into a group of n cover
pixels where B = 2n + 1 and the embedding capacity is
(1/n)log2(2n + 1) bpp; the other MDE-based methods, such
as Sudoku and SME, conceal one B-ary digit by two cover
pixels, and their embedding capacity is no more than
(1/2)log2B bpp, where B = 9 in Sudoku and B = 25 in
SME. But the proposed method can explore the embedding
directions of each pixel pair further by virtue of the
reference matrix with special properties described in
Section 2.1; thus, two 9-ary digits can be embedded into
each pixel pair. Therefore, the embedding capacity is up
to log29 bpp.
Security Comm. Networks 2016; 9:721728 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
DOI: 10.1002/sec
Figure 3. Stego-images obtained by the proposed method with full payload 3.169 bpp. PSNR, peak-signal-to-noise-rate.
(13)
(a)
(b)
(c)
(d)
Figure 4. Visual quality comparison with n = 2. (a) Partial area of original Lena, (b) stego of exploiting modication direction (EMD), (c)
stego of EMD-2, and (d) stego of the proposed method.
Figure 5. Peak-signal-to-noise-rate-ER comparison of different methods. LSB-MR, least signicant bitmatching revisited; EMD,
exploiting modication direction; SME, square matrix encoding.
0.25 bpp
Methods
0.5 bpp
Sudoku-S
EMD-2(n = 2)
Proposed
Sudoku-S
EMD-2(n = 2)
Proposed
0.091
0.036
0.366
0.138
0.367
0.137
0.039
0.019
0.156
0.063
0.155
0.065
First-order SPAM
Second-order SPAM
Figure 6. Regular/singular detection values for 1000 test images. LSB-MR, least signicant bitmatching revisited.
payload. Experimental results demonstrate high embedding capacity as well as good image quality and security.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This research work is supported by the National Natural
Science Foundation of China under grant no. 61472002,
Anhui Provincial Natural Science Foundation under grant
no. 1508085SQF216, Scientic Research Foundation for
Doctor of Anhui University under grant no. J10113190069,
and Foundation of Center of Information Support and
Assurance Technology for Anhui University under grant
no. ADXXBZ201411. Many thanks to Dr. Andrew Abel
from the University of Stirling for proofreading.
4. CONCLUSION
This paper proposed an image steganographic scheme with
both high embedding capacity and good embedding quality. A cover pixel pair can be modied to imply one or
two 9-ary digits according to different payloads. The modication directions are dened by the reference matrix with
special features. Differing from past work by others, this
method fully explores the potential of embedding space
in the reference matrix and improves the embedding
Security Comm. Networks 2016; 9:721728 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
DOI: 10.1002/sec
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Security Comm. Networks 2016; 9:721728 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
DOI: 10.1002/sec