An Image Steganography Scheme based on LSB++ and RHTF for Resisting Statistical Steganalysis

Abstract

Steganography is the art and science of secure communication. It focuses on both security and camouflage. Steganographic techniques must produce the resultant stego-image with less distortion and high resistance to steganalysis attack. This paper is mainly concerned with two steganographic techniques—least significant bit (LSB)++ and the reversible histogram transformation function (RHTF). LSB++ is likely to produce less distortion in the output image to avoid suspicion, but it is vulnerable to steganalysis attacks. RHTF using a mod function technique is capable of resisting the most popular and efficient steganalysis attacks, such as the regular- singular pair attack and chi-squared detection steganalysis, but it produces a lot of distortion in the output image. In this paper, we propose a new steganographic technique by combining both methods. The experimental results show that the proposed technique overcomes the respective drawbacks of each method.