Eigenfaces-Based Steganography.

Tomasz Hachaj,Katarzyna Koptyra,Marek R Ogiela

doi:10.3390/e23030273

Tomasz Hachaj, Katarzyna Koptyra + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/e23030273

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Abstract

In this paper we propose a novel transform domain steganography technique—hiding a message in components of linear combination of high order eigenfaces vectors. By high order we mean eigenvectors responsible for dimensions with low amount of overall image variance, which are usually related to high-frequency parameters of image (details). The study found that when the method was trained on large enough data sets, image quality was nearly unaffected by modification of some linear combination coefficients used as PCA-based features. The proposed method is only limited to facial images, but in the era of overwhelming influence of social media, hundreds of thousands of selfies uploaded every day to social networks do not arouse any suspicion as a potential steganography communication channel. From our best knowledge there is no description of any popular steganography method that utilizes eigenfaces image domain. Due to this fact we have performed extensive evaluation of our method using at least 200,000 facial images for training and robustness evaluation of proposed approach. The obtained results are very promising. What is more, our numerical comparison with other state-of-the-art algorithms proved that eigenfaces-based steganography is among most robust methods against compression attack. The proposed research can be reproduced because we use publicly accessible data set and our implementation can be downloaded.

Highlights

Steganography is a technique of hidden communication
In this paper we propose a novel transform domain technique in which the message is hidden in components of linear combination of high order eigenfaces vectors
Basing on the discussion presented in previous section we can conclude that proposed steganography method for hiding data in face images is usable and may be an interesting alternative to other state of the art approaches

Summary

Introduction

Steganography is a technique of hidden communication. The fact of passing messages between sender and recipient is kept secret by embedding messages in inconspicuous containers. These may be either common files, for example images and videos, or unexpected media, like geospatial data [1], network packets [2] and others [3]. In the digital era nearly any type of file may carry additional hidden data, but images are among most popular because the human visual system is unable to perceive subtle changes introduced by embedding process. There are many possible approaches to image-based steganography and we will discuss selected methods in the following subsection

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Discussion

Conclusion