An intelligent multivariate block steganography framework with enhanced PSO based on chaos mapping

Abstract

To safeguard private information, image steganography is extensively used. Research is focused on ways to enhance steganographic technologies so that they may increase compression ratio while maintaining steganography image integrity. Because of its essential qualities such as security, scalability, and robustness, Steganography is a preferred way of communicating protected secret information to prevent hacking and misuse. This proposed research offers a steganography approach based on Enhanced Chaotic Particle Swarm Optimization (ECPSO), which uses chaos theory to determine the optimal pixel positions in the cover picture to hide confidential information when keeping the steganography quality in the images. Both the cover and secret pictures are separated into blocks to increase hiding capacity, with each component storing a sufficient quantity of secret data by mapping the pixels. The suggested ECPSO-Stegano system has better results with the criteria of Mean Square Error (MSE) of 0.00018%, Peak-Signal-to-Noise-Ratio (PSNR) of 79.66%, Bit Error Rate (BER) of 0.45% in average, and Structural Similarity Index (SSI) of 0.98 in average for various input size. It’s also robust to statistical threats.