Algorithms For Hiding Information in Images

Algorithms for hiding information in images _____________________________________________________________________
1. Introduction
Digital watermarking is a kind of marker covertly embedded in a noise-tolerant signal such as audio or image data. It is typically used to identify ownership of the copyright of such signal. Watermarking is the process of hiding digital information in a carrier signal; the hidden information should, but does not need to contain a relation to the carrier signal. Digital watermarks may be used to verify the authenticity or integrity of the carrier signal or to show the identify of its owners. It is prominently used for tracing copyright infringements and for banknote authentification. Like traditional watermarks, digital watermarks are only perceptible under certain conditions, after using an algorithm, and imperceptible anytime else. If a digital watermark distorts the carrier signal in a way that it becomes perceivable, it is of no use. Traditional watermarks may be applied to visible media (like images or video), whereas in digital watermarking, the signal may be audio, pictures, videos, texts or 3D models. A signal may carry several different watermarks at the same time. Unlike that is added to the carrier signal, a digital watermark does not change the size of the carrier signal. [Wikipedia] The needed properties of a digital watermark depend on the use case in which it is applied. For marking media files with copyright information, a digital watermark has to be rather robust against modifications that can be applied to the carrier signal. Instead, if uprightness has to ensured, afraile watermark would be applied. Both steganography and digital watermarking employ steganographic techniques to embed data covertly in noisy signals. But whereas steganography aims for imperceptibility to human senses, digital watermarking tries to control the robustness as a first point. Since a digital copy of data is the same as the original, digital watermarking is passive protection tool. It just marks data, but does not degrade it nor controls acces to the data. One application of a digital watermarking is source tracking. A watermark is embedded into a digital signal at each point of distribution. If a copy of the work is found later, then the watermark may be retrieved from the copy and the source of the distribution is known. This technique reportedly has been used to detect the content of illegally copied movies. Watermarking is closely related to the fields of information hiding and steganography. These three fields have a great deal of overlap and share many technical approaches.However, there are fundamental philosophical differences that affect the requirements, and thus the design, of a technical solution Information hiding (or data hiding) is a general term encompassing a wide range of problems beyond that of embedding messages in content. The term hiding here can refer to either making the information imperceptible (as in watermarking) or keeping the existence of the information secret.
Figure 1.1 Top-level image watermarking procedure
Digital watermarking has become an active and important area of research, and development and commercialization of watermarking techniques is being deemed essential to help address some of the challenges faced by the rapid proliferation of digital content. Steganography is the art of hiding the fact that communication is taking place, by hiding information in other information. Many different carrier file formats can be used, but digital images are the most popular because of their frequency on the Internet. For hiding secret information in images, there exists a large variety of steganographic techniques some are more complex than others and all of them have respective strong and weak points. Different applications have different requirements of the steganography technique used. For example, some applications may require absolute invisibility of the secret information, while others require a larger secret message to be hidden. This paper intends to give an overview of image steganography, its uses and techniques. It also attempts to identify the requirements of a good steganographic algorithm and briefly reflects on which steganographic techniques are more suitable for which applications Since the rise of the Internet one of the most important factors of information technology and communication has been the security of information. Cryptography was created as a technique for securing the secrecy of communication and many different methods have been developed to encrypt and decrypt data in order to keep the message secret. Unfortunately it is sometimes not enough to keep the contents of a message secret, it may also be necessary to keep the existence of the message secret. The technique used to implement this, is called steganography. Steganography is the art and science of invisible communication. This is accomplished through hiding information in other information, thus hiding the existence of the communicated information. The word steganography is derived from the Greek words stegos meaning cover and grafia meaning writing defining it as covered writing. In image steganography the information is hidden exclusively in images. [Wikipedia]
The advantage of steganography over cryptography alone is that messages do not attract attention to themselves. Plainly visible encrypted messages, no matter how unbreakable, will arouse suspicion, and may in themselves be incriminating in countries where encryption is illegal. Therefore, whereas cryptography protects the contents of a message, steganography can be said to protect both messages and communicating parties. Steganography includes the concealement of information within computer files. In digital steganography, electronic communications may include steganographic coding inside of a transport layer, such as a document file, image file, program or protocol. Media files are ideal for steganographic transmission because of their large size. To a computer, an image is an array of numbers that represent light intensities at various points (pixels). These pixels make up the images raster data. A common image size is 640 480 pixels and 256 colors (or 8 bits per pixel). Such an image could contain about 300 kilobits of data. Digital images are typically stored in either 24-bit or 8bit les. A 24-bit image provides the most space for hiding information; however, it can be quite large (with the exception of JPEG images). All color variations for the pixels are derived from three primary colors: red, green, and blue. Each primary color is represented by 1 byte; 24bit images use 3 bytes per pixel to represent a color value. These 3 bytes can be represented as hexadecimal, decimal, and binary values. In many Web pages, the background color is represented by a six-digit hexadecimal numberactually three pairs representing red, green, and blue. A white background would have the value FFFFFF: 100 percent red (FF), 100 percent green (FF), and 100 percent blue (FF). Its decimal value is 255, 255, 255, and its binary value is 11111111, 11111111, 11111111,which are the three bytes making up white. This denition of a white background is analogous to the color denition of a single pixel in an image. Pixel representation contributes to le size. For example, suppose we have a 24-bit image 1,024 pixels wide by 768 pixels higha common resolution for highresolution graphics [George Mason, 1998]. Such an image has more than two million pixels, each having such a denition, which would produce a le exceeding 2 Mbytes. Because such 24-bit images are still relatively uncommon on the Internet, their size would attract attention during transmission. File compression would thus be benecial, if not necessary, to transmit such a le. With the development of computer and expanding its use in different areas of life and work, the issue of information security has become increasingly important. One of the grounds discussed in information security is the exchange of information through the cover media. To this end, different methods such as cryptography, 3
steganography, coding, etc have been used. The method of steganography is among the methods that have received attention in recent years. The main goal of steganography is to hide information in the other cover media so that other person will not notice the presence of the information. This is a major distinction between this method and the other methods of covert exchange of information because, for example, in cryptography, the individuals notice the information by seeing the coded information but they will not be able to comprehend the information. However, in steganography, the existence of the information in the sources will not be noticed at all. Most steganography jobs have been carried out on images, video clips ,texts, music and sounds .Nowadays, using a combination of steganography and the other methods, information security has improved considerably. In addition to being used in the covert exchange of information, steganography is used in other grounds such as copyright, preventing e-document forging.
Chapter 1. Introductory concepts in watermarking and steganography

Digital watermarking and steganography techniques are used to address digital rights management, protect information, and conceal secrets. Information hiding techniques provide an interesting challenge for digital forensic investigations. Information can easily traverse through firewalls undetected. Research into steganalysis techniques aids in the discovery of such hidden information as well as leads research toward improved methods for hiding information. Digital technology makes it very necessary to develop methods to protect against piracy of multimedia products. Pirate attacks include illegal access data on the Internet, changes in content made hateful, unauthorized retransmission copies. The impact of such attacks could be very high both financially (financial losses caused by unauthorized access and use data) and security plan. Regarding analog signals, the problem is solved by itself, because the copies are of lower quality than the originals (audio and video cassettes). Instead, digital information can be copied perfectly and distinguish between original and copy is difficult if not impossible to do. More, there is no mechanism to detect illegal copying or modification of content. Normally steganography is done intelligently such that it is difficult for an adversary to detect the existence of a hidden message in the otherwise innocuous data. The piece of data that has the message embedded in it is visible to the world in the clear and appears as harmless and normal. This is in stark contrast with cryptography where 4
the message is scrambled to make it extremely difficult or impossible for an adversary to put together. A message in ciphertext arouses some sort of suspicion whereas invisible message embedded in clear text does not. This is the advantage of steganography. Steganography can be used to code messages in any transport layer, an image (GIF/BMP/JPEG), a MP3 file, a communications protocol like UDP etc. Steganogrpahic information can also be added to richer multimedia content like DVDs. There are normally two motivations to send a secret message or to establish authenticity of a piece of information usually a multimedia file. The later is a major application of modern steganography and known as Digital Watermarking and Fingerprinting. Watermarks establish ownership of an artifact while fingerprints or labels help to identify intellectual property violators. They are different protocol implementation of the same basic idea.
1.1 Importance of digital watermarking

The increasing amount of research on watermarking over the past decade has been largely driven by its important applications in digital copyrights management and protection. Every watermarking system has some very important desirable properties. Some of these properties are often conflicting and we are often forced to accept some tradeoffs between these properties depending on the application of the watermarking system.[Melinos Averkiou, 2008] The Internet had become user friendly with the introduction of Marc Andreessens Mosaic web browser in November 1993, and it quickly became clear that people wanted to download pictures, music, and videos. The Internet is an excellent distribution system for digital media because it is inexpensive, eliminates warehousing and stock, and delivery is almost instantaneous. However, content owners (especially large Hollywood studios and music labels) also see a high risk of piracy. This risk of piracy is exacerbated by the proliferation of high-capacity digital recording devices. When the only way the average customer could record a song or a movie was on analog tape, pirated copies were usually of a lower quality than the originals, and the quality of second-generation pirated copies (i.e., copies of a copy) was generally very poor. However, with digital recording devices, songs and movies can be recorded with little, if any, degradation in quality. Using these recording devices and using the Internet for distribution, would-be pirates can easily record and distribute copyright-protected material without appropriate compensation being paid to the actual copyright owners. Thus, content owners are eagerly seeking technologies that promise to protect their rights. [Matthew Miller, 2008] The first technology content owners turn to is cryptography. Cryptography is probably the most common method of protecting digital content. It is certainly one of the best developed as a science. The content is encrypted prior to delivery, and a decryption key is provided only to those who have purchased legitimate copies of the content. The encrypted file can then be made available via the Internet, but would be useless to a pirate without an appropriate key. Unfortunately, encryption cannot help the seller monitor how a legitimate customer handles the content after decryption. A pirate can actually purchase
the product, use the decryption key to obtain an unprotected copy of the content, and then proceed to distribute illegal copies. In other words, cryptography can protect content in transit, but once decrypted, the content has no further protection. Watermarking has been considered for many copy prevention and copyright protection applications. In copy prevention, the watermark may be used to inform software or hardware devices that copying should be restricted. In copyright protection applications, the watermark may be used to identify the copyright holder and ensure proper payment of royalties. Although copy prevention and copyright protection have been major driving forces behind research in the watermarking field, there are a number of other applications for which watermarking has been used or suggested. These include broadcast monitoring, transaction tracking, authentication, copy control, and device control.
1.1.1 Applications of watermarking

Watermarking can be used in a wide variety of applications. In general, if it is useful to associate some additional information with a Work, this metadata can be embedded as a watermark. Of course, there are other ways to associate information with a Work, such as placing it in the header of a digital file, encoding it in a visible bar code on an image, or speaking it aloud as an introduction to an audio clip. 1. Broadcast Monitoring If a company is advertising, wants to know how many of the paid ads were actually transmitted, may monitor TV transmissions using human observers. Of course, this can be extremely expensive and not in addition. There are also monitoring systems, which appeals to human observers. They are divided into two categories: passive and active. Passive monitoring systems, try to recognize the direct broadcast content, as human observers. These are computer systems that compare the signal with broadcast signals that they have in the database (namely, signals representing advertising spots). These systems may not be practical because of the size of databases. In practice, these systems are not used to check if, for example, advertisement was broadcast. They are used mainly to obtain information about competitors. To obtain the accuracy required by the verification process should be used active monitoring systems, which is based on information associated, running with a proper content of the ads. Watermarking can be a solution to enable monitoring of TV transmissions. 2. Owner Identification This can be done through an author visible burn. This type of "marking" property but can be easily removed from that multimedia signal. The best example of this is the cutting of portions of an image that does not contain the "mark" author. Since the
markings may be imperceptible and inseparable from the original signal may be an ideal solution for identifying the author. 3. Proof of Ownership It would be desirable that the markings to serve not only to Mark" property, but even to prove. If Alice creates an image and a mark with "@2003 Alice, then Bob can steal the image, and using a program for image processing, can replace the mark with"@2003Bob. If Alice has not recorded an image of the central authority, she will need to demonstrate that the image belongs. If the attacker does not have a detector of marking, marking removal may be difficult to do. On the other hand, even if the mark can not be deleted using its marking system, Bob can show that his mark would be in Alice's original. Thus, a third party may not give the picture belongs to whom. This problem could be solved if, instead of demonstrating the property by marking, would show a picture that derives from another. 4. Transaction Tracking The marking records one or more operations that have been made on the copy of a multimedia product. For example, the marking can "store" an identity buyer (it is assumed that each buyer has a different copy of the original markings were not the same). 5. Content Authentification This can be done by the digital signature include multimedia signal. This signature is known as brand authentication. If a signal that contains such a mark is changed, to find out how it was distorted. 6. Copy Control Prevention of illegal copies can be made through encryption. There are three ways by which an adversary can obtain unauthorized access to multimedia products: if decrypt data without having a key; if you get a key by reverse-engineering; or simply obtain a key lawfully, making illegal copies of decrypted data. Marks can still content after decryption. However, protecting DVDs against copying was not yet perfect, because not every DVD player contains a detector of marking.
1.2 Importance of steganography

Electronic communication is increasingly susceptible to eavesdropping and malicious interventions. The issues of security and privacy have traditionally been approached using tools from cryptography. Messages can be appended with a message 7
authentication code (hash) and encrypted so that only the rightful recipient can read them and verify their integrity and authenticity. Modern cryptography is a mature field based on rigorous mathematical foundations and decades of development. Encrypted messages are obvious, and when intercepted, it is clear that the sender and the recipient are communicating secretly. Steganography is the little and much younger sister of cryptography. It is an alternative tool for privacy and security. Instead of encrypting messages, I can hide them in other innocuouslooking objects so that their very presence is not revealed. Thus, steganography can be a feasible alternative in countries where usage of encryption is illegal or in oppressive regimes where using cryptography might attract unwanted attention. As cryptanalysis is the other side of the cryptography coin, so steganalysis is an inseparable part of steganography. Indeed, one probably cannot develop a good steganographic method without spending a substantial amount of time on how to break it. The need for reliable steganalytic tools capable of detecting hidden messages has recently increased due to anecdotal evidence that steganography is being used by terrorists and child pornographers. However, I have been unable to substantiate these claims. The closest support I found was from a New York Times article from November 6, 2006. An Al Qaeda operative, Dhiren Barot, filmed reconnaissance video between Broadway and South Street and concealed it before distribution by splicing it to the end of a copy of the Bruce Willis movie Die Hard: With a Vengeance. A primitive form of steganography. [Jessica Fridrich, 2010]
1.2.1 Applications of steganography

Here I examine two applications of steganography, namely covert communications by dissidents and covert communications by criminals. These two applications are highlighted in order to examine the very different environmental conditions in which they operate. 1. Steganography for Dissidents There are many countries in the world where political dissent is neither tolerated nor legal. Any dissident organization must therefore exercise extremecaution when communicating among each other or with international organizations such as Amnesty International. The environment that dissidents operatein is usually overtly hostile. Encryption can provide dissidents with a means to assure the privacy of their communications. And if a sufficiently large key is used, then the likelihood of decryption by technical means is negligible, irrespective of the resources available to the adversary.Steganography may therefore be the safest form of communications between dissidents. 2. Steganography for Criminals Steganography offers an alternative to anonymous remailers. A possible disadvantage of steganography is that the communicating parties must have some
stego program installed on their computers, which may put them in a compromising situation if the computer is seized. Even if the stego program is uninstalled, many applications still leave footprints behind that can be traced and used to prove that a specific stego application was previously installed. Some steganographic methods are, however, so easy that the embedding process can be run directly as a command line and there is no need to have any stego software installed.
1.3 Related work

Steganography and watermarking are two similar domains that use many technical approaches. Im going to clarify these terms in a few study articles in order to have a more general idea in these techniques. 1. Jonathan K. and Frank Hartung , Digital watermarking of text, image, and video documents, University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany, 2008 This study presents the utility of digital watermarking in protecting digital documents. The ease of reproduction, distribution, and manipulation of digital documents creates problems for authorized parties that wish to prevent illegal use of such documents. To this end, digital watermarking has been proposed as a last line of defense. A digital watermark is an imperceptible, robust, secure message embedded directly into a document. The watermark is imperceptible both perceptually and statistically. Robustness means that the watermark cannot be removed or modified unless the document is altered to the point of no value. The watermark is secure if unauthorized parties cannot erase or modify it. Current watermarking schemes may be viewed as spread-spectrum communications systems, which transmit a message redundantly using a low-amplitude, pseudo-noise carrier signal. [Frank Hartung, 2008] An example highlights the basic mechanisms and properties of spread spectrum and their relation to watermarking. Finally, specific issues in watermarking of text, images, and video are discussed, along with watermarking examples. 2. Elias Kougianos and Saraju Mohanty, Hardware assisted watermarking for multimedia, VLSI Design and CAD Laboratory,United States, 2008 This study is an introduction to the background issues involved in digital watermarking. Digital media offer several distinct advantages over analog media, such as high quality, ease of editing, and ease of processing operations such as compression and high fidelity copying. Digital data is commonly available through digital TV broadcast, CD, DVD, and computing devices such as personal computers. The ease by which a digital media object can be duplicated and distributed has led to the need for effective digital rights management tools. Digital watermarking is one such tool. [Elias Kougianos, 2008] Watermarking is the process of embedding extra data called a watermark into a multimedia object, like image, audio, or video, such that the watermark can later be detected or extracted in order to make an assertion regarding the object. During the last
decade, numerous software based watermarking schemes have appeared in the literature and watermarking research has attained a certain degree of maturity. But hardware based watermarking systems have evolved more recently only and they are still at their infancy. The goal of hardware assisted watermarking is to achieve low power usage, realtime performance, reliability, and ease of integration with existing consumer electronic devices. In this paper, I survey the hardware assisted solutions proposed in the literature for watermarking of multimedia objects. 3. Gary C. Kessler and Chet Hosmer, An overview of steganography, Gary Kessler Associates, USA, 2011 This study is technical, in that it uses many examples using the current tools of the trade, without delving into the deeper mathematics, although references are provided to some of the ongoing research in the field. While this chapter provides a historical context for stego, the emphasis is on digital applications, focusing on hiding information in digital image or audio files. Examples of software tools that employ steganography to hide data inside of other files as well as software to detect such hidden files will also be presented. Steganography is the art of covered, or hidden, writing. The purpose of steganography is covert communication, to hide the existence of a message from a third party. Knowledge of steganography is of increasing importance to individuals in the law enforcement, intelligence, and military communities. This chapter provides a high-level introduction to methods and tools for both hiding information (steganography) and detecting hidden information (steganalysis). [Chet Hosmer, 2011] 4. Xiang-Yang Luo, Dao-Shun Wang and Ping Wang, A review on blind detection for image steganography, Institute of information Science and Technology, PR China, 2008 This paper presents a survey of blind steganalysis methods for digital images. First, a principle framework is described for image blind steganalysis, which includes four parts: image pretreatment, feature extraction, classifier selection and design, and classification. [Ping Wang, 2008] I classify the existing blind detection methods into two categories according to the development of feature extraction and classifier design. For the first category, I survey the principles of six kinds of typical feature extraction methods, describe briefly the algorithms of features extraction of these methods, and compare the performances of some typical feature extraction algorithms by employing the Bhattacharyya distance. For the second category, the development of classifier design, I make a survey on various classification algorithms used in existing blind detection methods, and detail the algorithms behind several classifiers based on multivariate regression analysis, OC-SVM, ANN, CIS and Hyper-geometric structure. Finally, some open problems in this field are discussed, and some interesting directions that may be worth researching in the future are indicated.
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1.4 Short description of the contents

In chapter 2 I will discuss about image watermarking in spatial domain. Several different methods enable watermarking in the spatial domain. The simplest (too simple for many applications) is just to flip the lowest-order bit of chosen pixels. This works well only if the image is not subject to any modification. A more robust watermark can be embedded by superimposing a symbol over an area of the picture. The resulting mark may be visible or not, depending upon the intensity value. Picture cropping, e.g., can be used to eliminate the watermark. Spatial watermarking can also be applied using color separation. In this way, the watermark appears in only one of the color bands. This renders the watermark visibly subtle such that it is difficult to detect under regular viewing. However, the mark appears immediately when the colors are separated for printing. This renders the document useless for the printer unless the watermark can be removed from the color band. This approach is used commercially for journalists to inspect digital pictures from a photostockhouse before buying unmarked versions. The characteristics of spatial domain are illustrated in table 1.2:
Computation Cost Robustness Capacity Perceptual Quality Example of Applications Spatial Domain Low Fragile High (depends on the size of the image) High Control Mainly Authentification Table 1.2 Spatial Domain Characteristics
In my case the proposed watermark method used a grayscale mark image resized in maximum dimensions who are possible embedding in host shared image. Using a 512x512 host image shared in 2x2 blocks we can obtain a 256x256 maximum mark image and a good robustness watermarked image. The secret key is uncorrelated with the original mark and we obtain a chaotic binary sequence of pixels of coded mark. The mark image obtained is nearly of a random noise and have a similar effect for the watermarked image. For extracting the mark image I used the difference of the original image, reweighting result and compute the medium difference of blocks as reconstruct mark. The reconstruct mark need to be decoding with key, the same key used for coding.After extracting and decoding, the result is obtained by displaying the reconstruct mark. I used for testing this method an simulated attack of JPEG compression with matlab functions. The attack test can be performed with every software who can compress an image. In chapter 3 I will use different metods for marking images with relevant examples. The first method approached for marking images is using discret wavelet transform. This method chosen is a non-fragile grayscale watermarking method. The
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main application of a fragile watermarking technique is in authentification of content. Any modification to the carrier image makes the watermark not recoverable and makes the attack obvious to the receiver. The technique chosen takes advantage of the wavelet transforming properties. The watermark extraction assumes that the receiver knows the original image and is looking to verify the authenticity of the received watermarked image. The watermark extraction technique compares the wavelet filter responses of the original and watermarked image and extracts the differences between the two. The comparison value of truth is the result of the extraction. The second method used for marking images is discrete cosine transform which is a blind fragile watermarking DCT method for grayscale images. This method expresses a finite sequence of data points in terms of a sum of cosine functions oscillating at different frequencies. Being a blind method, the watermark extraction assumes that the receiver have not the original image and uses the inverse algorithm from the process of the watermarking image. Also, for grayscale images exists a non-blind watermarking DCT method. Being a non-blind method, the watermark extraction assumes that the receiver have the original image. The watermark extraction uses the inverse algorithm from the process of the watermarking image. This second method have, also, a non-blind watermarking for color images. Being a non-blind method, the watermark extraction assumes that the receiver have the original image. The watermark extraction uses the inverse algorithm from the process of the watermarking image. The third method for marking images is discrete fourier transform which is a nonblind robust watermarking DFT method for grayscale images. Because is a non-blind method, the watermark extraction assumes that the receiver have the original image. The watermark extraction uses the inverse algorithm from the process of the watermarking image. The main application of the algorithm is for authentification of content. This is why it is important to analyze the effect of different attacks on the watermarked image. The most usual attacks are: JPEG Compression, Resizing and Adding Gaussian White Noise. The JPEG Compression method is ussualy lossy, meaning that some original image information is lost and cannot be restored. There are variations on the standard baseline JPEG that are lossless, but these are not widely supported. The image resizing is widely used to reduce bandwith consumption and for faster transfer. The additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel model is one in wich the information is given a single impairment: a linear addition of wideband or white noise with a constant spectral density and a Gaussian distribution of noise samples. In chapter 4 I will illustrate, through several tests, the methods I implemented in chapters 2 and 3 and compare them to see which one is the best to use in the process of watermarking image. This comparison I wil make with the help of PSNR (peak signal-tonoise ratio). This function computes the PSNR in decibels, between two images. This ratio is often used as a quality measurement between the original and a compressed image. The higher the PSNR, the better the quality of the compressed, or reconstructed image. 12
The equation describing the PSNR function is: PSNR = 10 , where R is the maximum fluctuation in the input image
data type and MSE is the Mean Square Error which is a error metric used to compare image compression quality.
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Algorithms For Hiding Information in Images

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Algorithms for hiding information in images _____________________________________________________________________