An Animated GIF Steganography Using Variable Block Partition Scheme

Abstract

The paper presents a novel Graphics Interchange Format (GIF) Steganography system. The algorithm uses an animated (GIF) file format video to apply on, a secured and variable image partition scheme for data embedding. The secret data could be any character text, any image, an audio file, or a video file; that is converted in the form of bits. The proposed method uses a variable partition scheme structure for data embedding in the (GIF) file format video. The algorithm estimates the capacity of the cover (GIF) image frames to embed data bits. Our method built variable partition blocks in an empty frame separately and incorporate it with randomly selected (GIF) frames. This way the (GIF) frame is divided into variable block same as in the empty frame. Then algorithm embeds secret data on appropriate pixel of the (GIF) frame. Each selected partition block for data embedding, can store a different number of data bits based on block size. Intruders could never come to know exact position of the secrete data in this stego frame. All the (GIF) frames are rebuild to make animated stego (GIF) video. The performance of the proposed (GIF) algorithm has experimented and evaluated based on different input parameters, like Mean Square Error (MSE) and Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) values. The results are compared with some existing methods and found that our method has promising results.