Steganographic approach to enhancing secure data communication using contours and clustering

Abstract

With the increasing developments in communication technologies, there is a need for extremely robust information exchange, which is the core aim of steganography. Steganography conceals this information into a trusted media, i.e., an image, video, or audio file, thereby masking its existence. In this paper, to improve the security of implanted data, a steganographic method is proposed that uses contours and clustering. Instead of using the entire image for embedding, the proposed method embeds the data in a particular location of the image that is obtained using a contour. Similar pixels inside the contour are grouped into clusters using the K-means clustering algorithm. Least-significant bit substitution is used to embed the data in the pixels of the cluster without causing any artifacts in the image. The experimental results indicate that our proposed scheme enhances security without degrading the image quality.