A Review on Spatial Domain Technique Based on
Image Steganography
Neha Sharma
Research Scholar, CSE
G D Goenka University
Gurugram, India
nehasharma0110@gmail.com
Abstract—As we are moving towards a digital world with rapid
strides and advancements in the field of communication of
information with effective use of technology, it becomes
mandatory that the communicable information is kept in an
electronic format. Since the advancements in this field is a
continuous process, some need gaps are also created during this,
which creates a concern in terms of security of this information. In
addition to cryptography, we can use steganography technique to
address these issues effectively. In nutshell, we can describe
steganography as security mechanisms which are used for the
concealed exchange of transmittable data. It can be defined as the
study of concealed information elucidation that explains how we
can securely hide the existing communicable information. If we
can successfully implement and achieve the principles and
techniques of steganography, the communicated messages evade
the attention of cyber threats like eavesdropper and attackers. By
using steganography, we can hide the information into different
embedding mediums which are also known as carriers. It can be
anyone of these like images, audio files, video files, and text files.
In the paper, we are focusing on spatial domain image based
steganography. The technique is scrutinized and argued in the
terms of its payload capacity i.e., the ability to hide information,
how much information can be hidden, and its robustness.
Keywords—Cryptography, LSB, PVD, Spatial Domain,
Steganography.
I. INTRODUCTION
Communication over the internet is the most desired source
of transmission of secret messages now a days. Digital medium
has gained much importance these days and is becoming the
reliable medium for the transfer of information. With the
development and admittance of internet to everyone, it has
become easier and possible to duplicate and to distribute the
digital information illegitimately [1]. Digitally transmitted data
can be unoriginal without any loss of content and quality as well,
which is a big problem to the security, authenticity and copyright
to the owner of the data [2] [3]. From past many years, people
have been struggling to develop state-of-the-art techniques for
secret communication. The three techniques related to security
systems are intertwined; steganography, watermarking and
cryptography. Both the techniques of cryptography and
steganography used for handling of data and information to
encrypt and hide them respectively. Both the techniques are
978-1-5386-0627-8/17/$31.00 2017
c IEEE
Dr. Usha Batra
HOD R&D, CSE/IT.
G D Goenka University
Gurugram, India
Usha.batra@gdgoenka.ac.in
widely known and used. Steganography hides the existence of
information whereas cryptography ciphers a message so that it
cannot be understood. In certain cases, sending the cipher
information draws the attention, while the concealed
information does not. The enactment of a stenographically
encrypted system can be measured through key factors like
undetectability and capacity. Undetectability shows the
difficulty to determine the hidden message. The other measure-
capacity shows the maximum amount of secret message or data
that can be hidden securely, & robustness, which denotes that
how fine the steganographic system counterattacks the
extraction of embedded data. Fig 1 illustrates the concept of
steganography in security mechanisms.
Fig. 1. Role of steganography in security mechanism.
The paper is categorized as: Section 2 briefly discusses
cryptography & its purpose. Section 3 describes steganography
and its use in digital medium. Section 4 describes the spatial
domain based technique of steganography and related Literature.
Finally, conclusion is presented in Section 5.
II. CRYPTOGRAPHY
Cryptography is a technique which has been used for years to
hide the data by encryption and decryption. Cryptography [4,5]
is the “ art and science” of attaining security through the
encoded messages in order to make them informative. The
high rate of growth in the networks is leading a common
culture for exchanging of the data at a very fast pace.
Cryptography is a word taken from the Greek word separated
24
into two parts first is “Krypto” defines hidden and “graphene”
means writing. Thus mutually it is considered as hiding the
written message from the correspondent to the recipient [6].
Cryptography has been pooled with the systems known as
“cryptosystems” which has been used for coding and decoding
of the messages. Some of the concepts used in cryptography are
described here [4]:
x Plain Text: Plain text is any text or data that is stored or
transmitted unencrypted.
x Cipher Text: Cipher means encoded or encrypted
message. When we convert the plain text into the form
which is non-readable or non-understandable text using
any suitable scheme.
x Encryption: It is the process that involves the conversion
of plain text messages using some algorithms into cipher
text messages.
x Decryption: It is the process that involves the conversion
of cipher text messages using some algorithms into plain
text messages.
x Key: key is used for encryption and decryption of the
messages sent from the sender to the receiver that makes
the process of cryptography secure.
A. Purpose of cryptography
Cryptography serves the following purposes [5]:
x Confidentiality: This specifies that only sender and
intended recipient can access the contents of message.
x Authentication: It ensures that who so ever is trying to
access the content is an authentic user.
x Integrity: It ensures that content of the message has not
been altered.
x Non-repudiation: It restricts the sender of a message to
disprove the claim of not sending the particular message.
x Access Control: It specifies and controls the various
accesses to the user.
x Availability: It ensures the availability of data every time
to all the authorized users.
III. STEGANOGRAPHY
Steganography has originated from a Greek word i.e.,
“steganos” and “graphie” which mean “enclosed writing”.
Jointly it referred as concealed (secret or enclosed) message. In
1499 first term was used by the Johannes Trithemius in his
Stegno-graphia. He has written a thesis on the cryptography and
Steganography disguised as a book on magic. Thus message
which is hidden under the object is considered as cover which
can be of anything i.e. images, articles, shopping lists or other
cover text. Therefore, it is a high security technique considered
for long data transmission. Fig 2, illustrates the building blocks
of steganography. First of all an image is selected to hide the
data. The secret data is then encrypted by choosing any one of
the encryption algorithm. Finally, the Image with the hidden
data is obtained which is also called stego-image.
2017 International Conference on Computing and Communication Technologies for Smart Nation (IC3TSN)
Secret
Message
Selected Image after
image to
Algorithm steganography
hide data
for
encryption
Fig. 2. Building blocks of steganography.
Accordingly, steganography is the process of hiding the
secret message before transmitting it to the receiver. Secret
message can be hidden within another digital medium such as
text, image, audio or video. With the application of this
technique intruder will not be able to suspect the existence of the
message. Steganography can be applied with cryptography. The
combination of steganography with cryptography is feasible by
first scribbling the message through cryptography and then
hiding the message through steganography. In Fig 3, the process
of steganography along with cryptography is depicted. Here, the
message and cover image is selected and then the message is
encrypted by using the private key by the sender and then the
encrypted message is hidden in the cover image, after then the
cover image is sent to the receiver. At receiving end the message
is extracted from the cover image and then the decryption of the
message is done by applying secret key shared by the sender [8].
Basic idea or motivation behind implementation of image
Steganography is to communicate between the members without
having fear of being attacked of messages. Due to its advantages,
it has been used in several areas e.g. military, intelligence
operatives or bureaus. These fields of espionage require a
method which can hide their critical data and no intermediate
person can evaluate the meaning of the data.
Secret
Message
Stego
System Stego
object
Encoder
Cover
Key Communic
ation
channel
Estimate
Stego
of secret
message
System
Decoder
Original
cover
Fig. 3. Model of steganography process with crytography [6].
The main aim of using steganography is to divert the
attention of the attacker from the hidden information.
A. Steganography in Digital Medium
x Text Steganography: This technique hides the secret
message in a text file. The secret data is stored behind every
nth letter of every word. Currently there are many
methods/techniques available like Format Based Method,
25
 Random and Statistical Method and Linguistics Method for
hiding secret message in text files.
x Image Steganography: This is used to hide the data by
attractive cover object as image. To hide secret message
pixel intensities are used. Here, images are extensively
used as cover object because there are number of bits
present in the digital representation of an image.
x Audio Steganography: The technique audio files for
hiding the secret message. The cover object used here is
WAV, AU, and MP3 sound files. Low Bit Encoding, Phase
Coding, and Spread Spectrum are the methods used in
audio steganography.
x Video Steganography: This technique hides the secret
message in video format. The cover object in this case may
be H.264, MP4, MPEG, and AVI video files.
x Network or Protocol Steganography: In this technique
we hide the data/information in the cover object using
network protocols such as TCP, UDP, ICMP, IP etc. There
are secret channels in OSI layer network model where
steganography can be used.
Let us now consider the terminologies associated with
Steganography:
x Cover: It is nothing but an original image which is used as
a carrier for embedding the secret information.
x Secret Message: It is the original message that is used to
hide into images. Message could be a plain text or some
other image.
x Stego Key: It is a key that is used to embed or extract the
secret messages from the cover and stego-images.
x Embedding Algorithm: The input to this algorithm is
cover image and message to be embedded and the output is
the stego-image which is sent simply to the extracting
algorithm.
x Extraction Algorithm: The input to this algorithm is
stego-image which is the output of the embedding
algorithm. This algorithm recovers the original message
from the stego-image.
IV. TECHNIQUES OF STEGANOGRAPHY
There are many ways for classifying steganographic
techniques. These ways can be categorized according to the
types of cover used with secret communication. Various
steganographic techniques that hides the information behind
image files include: i) Spatial Domain Techniques, ii) Spread
Spectrum techniques, iii) Transform Domain Techniques, iv)
Statistical Techniques, and v) Distortion Techniques. However,
in this paper spatial domain technique is covered in detail as
under:
A. Spatial Domain based Image Steganography
This technique encodes the message by using pixel gray level
along with their color values. The spatial domain technique is
referred as the most simple and less complex technique for
embedding and extracting process of steganography. The
limitation of the technique is that it can lead to the noise in the
26 2017 International Conference on Computing and Communication Technologies for Smart Nation (IC3TSN)
image. The techniques that falls under this category are: i) LSB
(Least Significant Bit), and ii) PVD (Pixel Value Differencing).
LSB is a Least Significant Bit technique. It is a process in which
the LSB pixels of the image are accustomed. It is a quite popular
among various researchers for embedding the message behind
the image due to its various properties such as it is less complex
and easy to implement. The implementation process of LSB
technique depends upon the type of image for example let’s
consider a 8 bit image then in this case the 8th bit of each byte
is indistinct to the bit of message which is going to encoded to
it. PVD stands for Pixel Value Differencing. Here, two
consecutive pixels are selected and then these pixels are
embedded with the data. Payload is calculated through the
difference between these two consecutive pixels and is treated
as a base which helps in determining whether two pixels
belongs to an edge or smooth area.
The technique that combines PVD and LSB was proposed
by [9], in order to enhance the capacity of PVD along with the
quality of the technique. LSB technique is an efficient way of
data hiding but the loophole is that it is easily detectable by the
intruder so to resolve this problem PVD is combined with it
because it is an approach that can pass from various program
detections. A techniques was proposed by [10], using the LSB
technique. In order to solve the problem of variations in pixels
after embedding the message the researcher combines the LSB
and Laplacian model of pixel difference distribution. The
proposed method is able to estimate the number of zero
difference value using the number of non-zero difference values
from stego-images and it also makes use of estimation error
between the estimated and actual values. Lifang Yu et al. [11],
proposed a steganography technique by using LSB for hiding
the message and then shuffles the message bit order based on
chaos in which the parameter selection was done on the basis of
genetic algorithm. This work enhances the performance of LSB
by collaborating it with chaos on the basis of genetic algorithm.
Authors in [12], proposed a new technique for information
hiding through Image Steganography in spatial domain. The
technique used for image steganography is PBMS i.e. Public
Bit Substitution Method along with the proposed STM i.e.
Steganography Transformation Machine. The objective of this
technique is to solve the problem binary operations for
exploitation of original image by using LSB technique. The
objective is achieved after applying Pixel encryption and
decryption technique. [13], proposed a new steganographic
method that uses geometric models in 3D. This algorithm
resists against linear mapping methods that preserves lines,
points, planes such as cropping, rotation, scaling. The algorithm
provides high data embedding capacity. The vertices of the
triangle has been used for embedding the data. Mamta Juneja
et. al [14] proposed a two component based LSB (Least
Significant Bit) methods for embedding secret data. The
proposed algorithm also uses an adaptive LSB based
steganography to make it more robust by integrating it with an
Advanced Encryption Standard (AES). Authors in [15],
defined a new approach for data hiding with respect to colored
image by using the combination of more than one technique.
The technique used in this are LSB and adaptive LSB for the
purpose of data substitution. Advanced Encryption Standards been carried in the spatial domain and is the most widely used
are also used in order to embedding the pixels randomly and technique.
filtering for the purpose of removing the noise from the final
image. The idea behind the proposed technique is that the pixels REFERENCES
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Embedding
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Advanced High data 50.15 db PSNR,
[16] Encryption capacity and high 0.627 MSE, 128
System security bytes data
LSB Insertion High Security 64.537 db PSNR
[17]
method

V. CONCLUSION
From the above work, it is concluded that the image
steganography is widely used technology for the purpose of
securing any kind of data whether it is text, digital, audio, video
etc. There are various techniques which are applied for
steganography. A considerable amount of research work has

2017 International Conference on Computing and Communication Technologies for Smart Nation (IC3TSN) 27