A novel secure image steganography scheme based on Hamming encoding and LSB matching revisited using Lah Transform

A novel secure image steganography scheme based on Hamming encoding and LSB matching revisited using Lah Transform

연구 분야: Strategies

학회: Multimedia Tools and Applications

Data hiding is a technique that conceals a given mystery message within a cover medium in a secure way. It provides an additional security layer to protect valuable data embedded into the cover medium and transferred via the Internet. Steganography approaches based on transform domains are the most popular due to their high security in image steganography. Unfortunately, these approaches have two major existing disadvantages significant computing power and limited embedding capacity. To overcome these drawbacks, in this paper a hybrid scheme based on Lah transform is proposed. At first, the Lah transform is utilized to generate the Lah coefficients from the considered 4-pixel blocks of the considered cover image. Then, these Lah components are modified to embed the valuable data. For embedding rates equal to or less than 0.5 bpp, a modified Hamming code based method (MHCBM) is employed to conceal the given message bits in the generated Lah components. For payload larger than 0.5 bpp into the Lah transform coefficients, a modified LSB matching revisited approach (MLSBMR) is used. This principle allows us to minimize statistical distortion to the stego images, while at the same time enhancing the security of the hidden message against statistical steganalysis approaches. Experimental results indicated that the proposed scheme achieved better perceptual quality and higher security performance compared to the existing Lah transform based method and the relevant integer based transform approaches.