ISSN (Print) : 2319-5940

ISSN (Online) : 2278-1021

International Journal of Advanced Research in Computer and Communication Engineering

Vol. 3, Issue 1, January 2014

A PROPOSED METHOD IN IMAGE

STEGANOGRAPHY TO IMPROVE IMAGE
QUALITY WITH LSB TECHNIQUE
Krati vyas1, B.L.Pal2
M.tech student, Department of C.S.E, Mewaruniversity, Chittorgarh, India 1
Asst.Professor, Department of C.S.E, Mewar University, Chittorgarh, India 2

Abstract: Image steganography is becoming an important area in the field of steganography. As the demand of
security and privacy increases, need of hiding their secret information is going on. If a user wants to send their secret
information to other persons with security and privacy he can send it by using image steganography. During the last
few years lot of different methods of hiding information has been done in this field. Some of the existing methods for
hiding information give good results only in case of information gets hidden successfully.
LSB is the most popular Steganography technique. It hides the secret message in the RGB image based on it its binary
coding. LSB algorithm is used to hide the secret messages by using algorithm. LSB changes the image resolution quite
clear as well as it is easy to attack. It is clear that LSB changes the image resolution when the least significant bits add
in the binary image format, so that image quality become burst and there become so much difference in the original
image and encoded image in the respect of image quality.
So to overcome this problem, In this thesis I suggested modifying the LSB technique so that we can get same image
quality as it has before the encoding. The basic idea to get good image quality, I am going to modify the hiding
procedure of the least significant bit. In this step I will hide two bits by two bits by taking identical values.
Keywords: LSB, RGB

I. INTRODUCTION
A. Stegnography
Steganography and cryptography are cousins in the spy file as the cover_medium). The cover_medium (and, thus,
craft family. Cryptography scrambles a message by using the stego_medium) are typically image or audio files.
certain cryptographic algorithms for converting the secret “Steganography‟s niche in security is to supplement
data into unintelligible form. On the other hand, cryptography, not replace it. If a hidden message is
Steganography hides the message so that it cannot be seen encrypted, it must also be decrypted if discovered, which
[1]. provides another layer of protection.”
In the other words, we can say that steganography is the B. Steganalysis
science of hiding information. Whereas the goal of
cryptography is to make data unreadable by a third party, Steganalysis is the process of identifying steganography
the goal of steganography is to hide the data from a third by inspecting various parameter of a stego media. The
party [2]. primary step of this process is to identify a suspected stego
The basic structure of Steganography is made up of three media. After that steganalysis process determines whether
components: the “cover medium”, the hidden message, that media contains hidden message or not and then try to
and the key. The cover medium can be a painting, a digital recover the message from it.
image, an mp3, even a TCP/IP packet among other things. In the cryptanalysis it is clear that the intercepted message
It is the object that will „carry‟ the hidden message. A key is encrypted and it certainly contains the hidden message
is used to decode/decipher/discover the hidden message. because the message is scrambled. But in the case of
This can be anything from a password, a pattern, a black- steganalysis this may not be true. The suspected media
light, or even lemon juice. The following formula provides may or may not be with hidden message. The steganalysis
a very generic description of the pieces of the process starts with a set of suspected information streams
steganographic process: [3]. Then the set is reduced with the help of advance
Cover medium + hidden data + stego key = stego statistical methods.
medium II. LITERATURE REVIEW
In this context, the cover_medium is the file in which we
will hide the hidden_data, which may also be encrypted A. Earlier Techniques of Steganography
using the stego_key. The resultant file is the The common modern technique of steganography exploits
stego_medium (which will, of course. be the same type of the property of the media itself to convey a message.
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International Journal of Advanced Research in Computer and Communication Engineering

Vol. 3, Issue 1, January 2014

The following media were the candidate for digitally on digital image in bitmap format as well as for the
embedding message: compressed image format like JPEG. In JPEG format,
 Plaintext each pixel of the image was digitally coded using discrete
 Still imagery cosine transformation (DCT). The LSB of encoded DCT
 Audio and Video components could be used as the carriers of the hidden
 IP datagram. message. The details of above techniques were explained
below:
Plaintext steganography
Modification of LSB of a cover image in 'bitmap' format.
In this technique the message was hide within a plain text
file using different schemes like use of selected characters, In this method binary equivalent of the message (to be
extra white spaces of the cover text etc. hidden) is distributed among the LSBs of each pixel. For
example we tried to hide the character „A‟ into an 8-bit
Use of selected characters of cover Text. color image [4]. We had taken the eight consecutive pixels
Sender was sent a series of integer number (Key) to the from top left corner of the image. The equivalent binary
recipient with a prior agreement that the secret message bit pattern of those pixels might be like this: -
was hidden within the respective position of subsequent 00100111 11101001 11001000 00100111 11001000
words of the cover text. For example the series was „1, 1, 11101001 11001000 00100111
2, 3, 4, 2, 4,‟ and the cover text was “A team of five men Then each bit of binary equivalence of letter 'A' i.e.
joined yesterday”. So the hidden message is “Atfvea”. A 01100101 were copied serially (from the left hand side) to
“0” in the number series was indicated a blank space in the the LSB's of equivalent binary pattern of pixels, resulting
recovered message [3]. The word in the received cover the bit pattern became like this: -
text was skipped if the number of characters in that word 00100110 11101001 11001001 00100110 11001000
was less than the respective number in the series (Key) 11101001 11001000 00100111
which was also be skipped during the process of message The only problem with this technique was that it was very
unhide. vulnerable to attacks such as image compression and
formatting.
Use of extra white space characters of cover text.
Applying LSB technique on DCT
A number of extra blank spaces were inserted between
consecutive words of cover text. This numbers were The following steps were followed in this case: -
mapped to a hidden message through an index of a lookup (i) The Image was broken into data units each of them
table. For example extra three spaces between adjacent consists of 8 x 8 block of pixels.
words were indicated the number “3” which subsequently (ii) Working from top-left to bottom-right of the cover
indicates a specific text of a look-up table which was image, DCT was applied to each pixel of each data
available to the both communicating parties as a prior unit.
agreement [3]. (iii) After applying DCT, one DCT Coefficient was
generated for each pixel in data unit.
Still imagery steganography (iv) Each DCT coefficient was then quantized against a
reference quantization table.
The most widely used technique today is hiding of secret
(v) The LSB of binary equivalent the quantized DCT
messages into a digital image. This steganography
coefficient replaced by a bit from secret message.
technique exploits the weakness of the human visual
(vi) Encoding was then applied to each modified
system (HVS). HVS could not detect the variation in
quantized DCT coefficient to produce compressed
luminance of color vectors at higher frequency side of the
Stego Image.
visual spectrum. A picture can be represented by a
collection of color pixels. The individual pixels could be
represented by their optical characteristics like 'brightness',
'chroma' etc. Each of these characteristics could digitally
expressed in terms of 1s and 0s.
For example: a 24-bit bitmap had 8 bits,
representing each of the three color values (red, green, and
blue) at each pixel. If we considered just the blue there
were come out 28 different values of blue. The difference
between 11111111 and 11111110 in the value for blue
intensity was likely to be undetectable by the human eye.
Hence, if the terminal recipient of the data was nothing but
human visual system (HVS) then the Least Significant Bit
(LSB) can be used for something else other than color
information [3]. This technique could be directly applied
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International Journal of Advanced Research in Computer and Communication Engineering

Vol. 3, Issue 1, January 2014

Figure Ошибка! Текст указанного стиля в

документе отсутствует..1: Example of still imagery
steganography. Left hand side image is the original cover
image, whereas right hand side embedding a text file into
the cover image make the stego image.
Figure Ошибка! Текст указанного стиля в
Audio and Video Steganography документе отсутствует..2: Least Significant Bit Hiding
Technique
In audio steganography, secret message was embedded
into digitized audio signal which result slight altering of From the above figure it is clear we are hiding two least
binary sequence of the corresponding audio file. There significant bits directly. But they occurs a problem when
were several methods available for audio steganography. we hide these two least significant bits in the image, the
resolution of the image becomes blur. So that there
III .PROBLEM STATEMENT become a difference between original image and encoded
As we know that steganography is a message hiding image. The quality of the image does not remain same
technique so that a user can send or communicate to the after hiding these bits. This is the main problem of LSB
other user about their secret message securely. technique.
I want to overcome the LSB technique from this problem
LSB is one of the most popular technique which is used
so I am going to propose a modification in LSB by which
for hiding the secret message. LSB hiding technique works
this problem will remove from this technique. The basic
as it hides the secret message directly in the least two
idea of my propose method is that choose one pixel of the
significant bits in the image pixels, which affects the
image randomly, select this pixel as the centre of the
image resolution, due to this it reduces the image quality
image and divide the image into three parts Red, Green
and make the image easy to attack.
and Blue parts separately according this centre pixel. Now
Therefore there may be one possibility to remove this hide two by two bits of the secret message in each part of
problem and make the secret message more secure and the pixel by searching about the identical, if the identical
enhance the quality of the image is proposed. The found or satisfied then set the image with new values if the
proposed method hides the secret message based on identical does not find, hide in the two least significant bits
searching about the identical values between the secret and set the image with new values. Now save the location
messages and image pixels. By using this proposed of the hiding bits in binary table. This modification will
method the image will remain same after encoding or give the same image quality as original image after the
hiding the secret message in the image. It will not affect encoding.
the image resolution.
IV. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS
A. Problemformulation LSB technique performs the task to hide the data. Now we
implement it on a image by using matlab system. In the
In the previous chapter we have discussed several following figure there are two images, the figure (a) is
steganography techniques, but in this thesis I will give showing the original image in which we have to hide the
concentration on LSB technique. our secret data. Now load this original image in the system
Least Significant Bit hiding technique and perform all the LSB technique‟s step one by one to
hide the data in this image. When we successfully
LSB is the most popular Steganography technique. Many complete all the steps, we can see the encoded image in
carrier messages can be used in the recent technologies, figure (b).
such as Image, text video and many others. LSB uses the
image as carrier message because the image file is the
most popular for this purpose because it easy to send
during the communication between the sender and
receiver. It uses the RGB color image as carrier message.
The RGB image has 24 bits values per pixel represent by
(00000000, 00000000 and 00000000) for black and
(11111111, 1111111 and 11111111) for white pixels. It
hides the secret message in the RGB image based on it its
binary coding. Figure 3.1 presents an example about pixel
values and shows the secret message. LSB algorithm is
used to hide the secret messages by using algorithm. LSB
makes the changes in the image resolution quite clear as
well as it is easy to attack.
(a) Image (b) Image
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International Journal of Advanced Research in Computer and Communication Engineering

Vol. 3, Issue 1, January 2014

Now give a attention on both images original and encoded Histogram of (a) Original
image we can clearly see the difference between the
original image and encoded image. Encoded image is that
image which has the secret data by performing the LSB
technique. The resolution of the encoded image is burst
from the original image.

The difference between the original image and encoded

image can also see from the following histograms of the
both original image and encoded image by using LSB
technique in Gray and RGB formats.

Encoded image in Red color scale

Histogram of (a) Original

Histogram of (a) Original

Encoded image in Gray scale Encoded image in Green color scale

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International Journal of Advanced Research in Computer and Communication Engineering

Vol. 3, Issue 1, January 2014

Histogram of (a) Original Bar plot of the encoded images (a) by using LSB
technique

Encoded image in Blue color scale

A. Results
The following figure 6.12 shows the bar plot of the
original image. When we hide the secret data in the
original image by using LSB technique and proposed Bar plot of the encoded images by using proposed
method it gives the following results, which shows figure technique
6.13 (a) and (b).
Now compare the bar plot(figure b) of the encoded image
which comes out by using proposed method to that of the
original image. We can see that bar plot of the original and
encoded image is about same.

Now from the above experiments, we select an

image as original image and performs LSB hiding
technique on that image for hiding the secret data or
information and after encoding the original image, we
compare the both images original and encoded image we
find the difference between them. After that we draw the
histogram of both original and encoded image in different
color scales we find the difference between them and now
we draw the bar plot of both original and encoded images
we also find difference here between them. So that from
Bar plot of the original image
these results we easily say that when we apply LSB
technique on an image it affects the resolution of the
Now compare the bar plot (figure a) of the encoded image
original image after encoding.
by using LSB technique. We can see that there are so
many places on the bar plot of encoded image, which
If we talk about the proposed method in the
create differences between the original image bar plot and
experiments we can see the encoded image is about same
that of the encoded image.
as original image and when we draw the histograms of
both images in different color scales, all histograms are
also about same of the original image and encoded image.
At finally we draw the bar plots of original image and
encoded image we can see that both bar plots are about
same. While in all the experiments we find the opposite
results when we compare these all experiments with taking
encoded image by using LSB technique to the original
image.
So finally from the whole discussion we can say
that LSB technique affects the resolution of an image
when it applies to the original image for hiding the secret
data while here we can also see that the proposed method
does affect the resolution of an image when it applies on
an original image for hiding the data.
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[9] Zhang, T., Ping, X.: A new approach to reliable detection of LSB
steganography in natural images. Signal Processing 83 (2003)
2085–2093.
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approach based on both complexity estimate and statistical filter,”
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Free Documentation License http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct-
bits between the secret messages and image pixels values.
sequence_spread_spectrum http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency-
The proposed method was compared with the LSB hopping_spread_spectrum
benchmarking method for hiding the secret message which [13] G.-l. Liang, S.-z. Wang, and X.-p. Zhang. Steganography in binary
hide the secret message directly in the least two significant image by checking data-carrying ligibility of boundary pixels.
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bits of the image pixels.
2007.
The proposed method is more efficient, simple, [14] M. Y. Wu and J. H. Lee. A Novel Data Embedding Method for
appropriate and accurate than LSB method, it search about Two-Color Facsimile Images. International Symposium on
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[15] H.-K. Pan, Y.-Y. Chen, and Y.-C. Tseng. A secure data hiding
image resolution is quite low, as well as it makes the
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[17] M. Wu and B. Liu. Data hiding in binary image for authentication
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In our thesis work we propose a new approach which give [18] Y.C. Tseng and H.-K. Pan. Secure and invisible data hiding in 2-
color images.20th Annual Joint Conference of the IEEE Computer
good quality of the image after encoding the original and Communications Societies, 2:887–896, 2001.
image by using the LSB technique because LSB technique
has a drawback it affects the resolution the original image
after encoding, so that image quality go burst. The future
work on this project is to improve the compression ratio of
the image to the text. The main intention of the project is
to develop a steganographic application that provides good
security. The proposed approach provides higher security
and can protect the message from stego attacks. The image
resolution doesn‟t change much and is negligible.

REFERENCES

[1] “Data Hiding in Digital Images: A Steganographic Paradigm”

M.Tech Thesis Report by PiyushGoel.
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