LSB Plane Research Articles

Robust RDH Technique using Sorting and IPVO-based Pairwise PEE for Secure Communication

Nowadays, Reversible Data Hiding (RDH) is used extensively in information sensitive communication domains to protect the integrity of hidden data and the cover medium. However, most of the recently proposed RDH methods lack robustness. Robust RDH methods are required to protect the hidden data from security attacks at the time of communication between the sender and receiver. In this paper, we propose a Robust RDH scheme using IPVO based pairwise embedding. The proposed scheme is designed to prevent unintentional modifications caused to the secret data by JPEG compression. The cover image is decomposed into two planes namely HSB plane and LSB plane. As JPEG compression most likely modifies the LSBs of the cover image during compression, it is best not to hide the secret data into LSB planes. So, the proposed method utilizes a pairwise embedding to embed secret data into HSB plane of the cover image. High fidelity improved pixel value ordering (IPVO) based pairwise embedding ensures that the embedding performance of the proposed method is improved.

Robust RDH Technique Using Sorting and IPVO-Based Pairwise PEE for Secure Communication

Nowadays, Reversible Data Hiding (RDH) is used extensively in information sensitive communication domains to protect the integrity of hidden data and the cover medium. However, most of the recently proposed RDH methods lack robustness. Robust RDH methods are required to protect the hidden data from security attacks at the time of communication between the sender and receiver. In this paper, we propose a Robust RDH scheme using IPVO based pairwise embedding. The proposed scheme is designed to prevent unintentional modifications caused to the secret data by JPEG compression. The cover image is decomposed into two planes namely HSB plane and LSB plane. As JPEG compression most likely modifies the LSBs of the cover image during compression, it is best not to hide the secret data into LSB planes. So, the proposed method utilizes a pairwise embedding to embed secret data into HSB plane of the cover image. High fidelity improved pixel value ordering (IPVO) based pairwise embedding ensures that the embedding performance of the proposed method is improved.

Improving embedding efficiency for digital steganography by exploiting similarities between secret and cover images

Digital steganography is becoming a common tool for protecting sensitive communications in various applications such as crime/terrorism prevention whereby law enforcing personals need to remotely compare facial images captured at the scene of crime with faces databases of known criminals/suspects; exchanging military maps or surveillance video in hostile environment/situations; privacy preserving in the healthcare systems when storing or exchanging patient’s medical images/records; and prevent bank customers’ accounts/records from being accessed illegally by unauthorized users. Existing digital steganography schemes for embedding secret images in cover image files tend not to exploit various redundancies in the secret image bit-stream to deal with the various conflicting requirements on embedding capacity, stego-image quality, and undetectibility. This paper is concerned with the development of innovative image procedures and data hiding schemes that exploit, as well as increase, similarities between secret image bit-stream and the cover image LSB plane. This will be achieved in two novel steps involving manipulating both the secret and the cover images, prior to embedding, to achieve higher 0:1 ratio in both the secret image bit-stream and the cover image LSB plane. The above two steps strategy has been exploited to use a bit-plane(s) mapping technique, instead of bit-plane(s) replacement to make each cover pixel usable for secret embedding. This paper will demonstrate that this strategy produces stego-images that have minimal distortion, high embedding efficiency, reasonably good stego-image quality and robustness against 3 well-known targeted steganalysis tools.

A recoverable chaos‐based fragile watermarking with high PSNR preservation

AbstractThe preservation of high peak signal‐to‐noise ratio of the watermarked image is required in some applications. The chaos‐based fragile watermarking proposed by Rawat et al. in 2011 can meet this requirement, for only one LSB plane of the original image is modified by the watermark data. However, there are three drawbacks in the original scheme: (i) insecurity, the host image can be tampered without being detected; (ii) the detected tampered area is incomplete; and (iii) the most important thing is that the tampered area is unrecoverable. Enlightened by the work of Rawat et al., we propose a new recoverable chaos‐based fragile watermarking scheme, in which all of the drawbacks in the original scheme have been overcome, while the size of the watermark is unchanged, therefore the high peak signal‐to‐noise ratio characteristic can be preserved. The chaotic map is used to ensure the security; the idea of block dividing is adopted to improve the tamper detection and to make storage space for the recovery data embedding; and the border matching recovery based on vector quantization is proposed to improve the recovery result of the target image. Experiments show that our method is secure and recoverable, and the recovery ability is extremely satisfactory. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Selective Plane Replacement Watermarking and Cryptography (SPRWC)

Background/Objectives: Telemedicine is an innovative system of healthcare provision from long distance. Though the technology adds to facilitating in reducing the patients’ visit, but requires innovative techniques to prevent illegal intruders during the transaction of medical images. Methods/Statistical Analysis: This paper introduces Selective Plane Replacement Watermarking with RSA Cryptography (SPRWRC) that combines bit plane slicing technique with a standard public key cryptographic algorithm by embedding the hospital logo as invisible watermark. The medical image that is to be shared over the public network is subjected to bit plane slicing. The hospital logo is encrypted by the standard public key cryptographic algorithm namely Rivest Shamir Adleman (RSA). The encrypted hospital logo is embedded into the MSB plane of the medical image. The LSB plane of the medical image is replaced with the embedded MSB plane. The image is reconstructed and transmitted over the public network. Findings: The hybrid algorithm explores a watermarking approach in spatial domain with hospital logo as the watermark. The maximum Entropy, NPCR and UACI values are 7.988, 0.998 and 0.46 respectively which are closer to the upper limit of theoretical values. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithm is verified against various attacks. The proposed method with encryption gives better result than without encryption due to scrambling of the watermark and embedding into the cover image does not show perceptible change on watermarked image. Application/Improvements: Protection of the integrity and confidentiality of medical images transactioned over public networks.

Properties of Images in LSB Plane

Each pixel of an Image (assuming 24 bit BMP) is stored in the three 8 bits corresponding to three colors. Bit Plane Slicing is the technique of breaking image into 8 planes corresponding to 8 different bit positions. The bit plane image corresponding to the plane of the most significant bit (MSB) has the maximum contribution to the total image and forms the majority of the visually significant image data and planes corresponding to other lower bit positions contribute only the subtle details of the image. And the bit-plane image corresponding to the LSB of the RGB value has the minimum contribution of only 1 out of total of 255 Intensity level to the total image. In spite of this the LSB Plane of the image is not insignificant. In fact it is used in Image Steganography for hiding secret information in the images. Image based Steganography is a potent tool used by Terrorists and Criminal organizations for securely broadcasting, dead-dropping and communicating malicious secret messages over the internet by hiding them in the images. Our cyber space is full of such mala-fide images containing hidden secret information. The most difficult aspect of tracking such malicious images is the lack of efficient and fast algorithms for identifying and isolating them from the bulk of innocent images. Analysis of the pixels in the LSB Plane of the image is very effective technique of identification of Distributing Spatial Domain Steganographic Algorithms. In this paper the properties of Information Pixels pixel present in the LSB Plane of any stego image generated by Distributing Algorithms is analyzed in detail. These properties will be very useful in identification of malafide stego images lurking in our cyber space. All the images and tables used in this paper are generated using MATLAB ©Image Processing Tool Box.

A Double Layered “Plus-Minus One” Data Embedding Scheme

In image steganography, a pixel can carry secret bits by choosing adding/subtracting one to/from the gray value. This kind of "plusmn1 steganography" can hide a longer message than simple LSB embedding. We propose a double-layered embedding method for implementing "plusmn1 steganography," in which binary covering codes and wet paper codes are used to hide messages in the LSB plane and the second LSB plane, respectively. We show that this method can achieve the upper bound on the embedding efficiency of "plusmn1 steganography" when the employed binary covering codes reach the upper bound on that of LSB steganography. Applications using random and structured covering codes show that the new method outperforms previous ones and can approach the upper bound.

Efficient double-layered steganographic embedding

Adding/subtracting one into/from pixel values can be used to hide secret data into the least significant bit plane of a cover image. A double-layered embedding scheme that introduces the wet paper coding mechanism to determine the selection of addition or subtraction is proposed. In this way, the second LSB plane can be exploited to carry additional secret data, leading to improved embedding efficiency and embedding rate. By combining the double-layered embedding method with various steganographic coding techniques, even higher embedding efficiencies can be achieved while keeping low embedding rates.