Analytical Study on LSB-Based Image Steganography Approach

Abstract

AbstractSteganography has recently turned out to be an excellent field of science that is used to shield data from illegal entry. Steganography is described as the skill of communication which involves concealing knowledge in a different medium, for instance, textual, image, audio, video, or network in order not to provoke any trace, whereas steganalysis is the discipline of destroying the steganographic mechanism to expose the undisclosed communication. The efficiency of a steganography procedure is measured utilizing three key criteria, and they include payload efficiency, image excellence calculation, and degree of protection. This investigation is concentrated on image steganography which is extremely accepted in the steganography field. The least significant bit (LSB) approach is mainly the effectual method employed to entrench the undisclosed communication. The study, therefore, focused on the least significant bit steganography algorithm, thereby increasing its performance by proposing a modified least significant bit steganography called circular shift LSB. The study also elucidated the LSB entrenching procedure and presented the assessment outcomes for LSB text steganography for different cover object formats such as .png, .bmp, and .jpeg. This paper has more comprehensive information on different cover image formats, focused on LSB. A comparative assessment was carried out to establish the usefulness of the suggested approaches. The success of the projected approach was appraised by the computation of mean square error (MSE) and peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR). The investigation showed that the LSB methods improved PSNR and MSE. Furthermore, PSNR error metrics were high and MSE was low indicating strong and robust cover image quality which makes the image highly imperceptible to human eyes or intruders.KeywordsSteganographyLeast significant bitPSNRMSEComparative analysis