Enhancing Least Significant Bit Steganography Image Fidelity Using Brotli Compression

Abstract

The rapid growth of technology has provided extensive convenience and openness in accessing information, yet this hasn't been balanced with an equivalent enhancement in information security. Steganography plays a crucial role in concealing and protecting data, with the Least Significant Bit (LSB) method being a commonly used algorithm that operates by substituting the least significant bits in the image pixels with the bits of the data to be hidden, aiming to preserve the image quality. This research aims to enhance the quality of the steganography result using LSB by employing the Brotli compression technique, coupled with increasing image's capacity. Brotli compression aims to reduce the size of the resulting stego image by combining embedded data that share identical values. Experiment results will be obtained by comparing the original image with the stego image using metrics like Mean Square Error (MSE), Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR), and Structural Similarity Index (SSIM). The experiments successfully demonstrated that the integration of LSB with Brotli compression outperformed the regular LSB method, showing a 6.64% increase in PSNR, followed by a decrease in MSE by approximately 63.79%, and an increase in SSIM by around 0.0039%. This was accompanied by a continuous increase in compression values depending on the input data size. These results indicate that the integration of LSB with Brotli compression was successfully implemented to enhance the fidelity of the stego image