Adaptive Bit Rotation and Inversion Scoring: A Novel Approach to LSB Image Steganography

Abstract

In image steganography, the direct trade-off between the aspects of image’s imperceptibility and payload capacity has always been a long-time challenge wherein the improvement of one aspect degrades the other. The more secret data is embedded into an image, the more it begins to look different from the original image. The more the image looks altered, the more it will be suspected of hiding something else other than the visible picture that it is displaying. This study proposes a novel image steganographic approach that produces secret-embedded images with payload capacity comparable with other late variations of spatial domain steganography techniques but with a better imperceptibility level. The nature of the approach is similar to classic LSB (Least Significant Bit) substitution steganography techniques wherein the bit information of the secret message is embedded into the image by replacing the LSB value of its pixel, except that this approach had the embedding bits undergo a series of evaluated and scored bit rotation and inversion operations prior bit replacement in its attempt to embed secret bits into an image with minimal pixel distortion as possible. This study however does not explore the security aspect of the generated image against its resistance to geometric and steganalysis attacks.