International Journal of Computer Trends and Technology (IJCTT) volume 4 Issue 6June 2013

ISSN: 2231-2803 http://www.ijcttjournal.org Page 1792

Comparative Study of Image Steganography
Techniques
Sunila Godara
1
, Megha Ranolia
2
, Vanita Rawal
3

1
Assistant Professor, Computer Science department ,Guru Jambheshwar University of Science & Technology,India
2,3
Student, Computer Science Department,Guru Jambheshwar University of Science & Technology,India

ABSTRACT- Steganography is a method in which only the sender
and the recipient can expect the existence of the hidden data.
Main purpose of this is to hide the secret message in such a way
that it remains intact, undetectable, robust and the parent data
should be able to accommodate high capacity of secret data.
Various steganographic software has been designed with
different features and capability to hide data. Further research
could be done for establishment of innovative methods and
techniques. This paper presents a comparative study of some
existing image steganography techniques.
Keywords- Image steganography, LSB, DCT, F5, outgues, PQ,
Model based.
I. INTRODUCTION
Steganography is way of communication in secret way that
only the sender and the intended receiver knows about the
message. As it hides the private or sensitive information
within something that appears to be nothing out of the usual.
Mostly there is confusion between Steganography
and cryptology because the two are similar in the way that
they both are used to protect important information.
The only difference between two is that
Steganography involves hiding information in such a way that
it appears as no information is hidden at all. If the person or
persons views the object in which the information is hidden
and he or she have no idea that there is any information
hidden behind, then the person will not try to decrypt the
information.
Usually a password is used for encryption, when an
information is hidden inside the carrier file. Steganography is
one of the fundamental ways that helps in keeping the data
confidential.
Information is vital to human efforts indeed digital
information offers wonderful opportunities and improvements
to persons life, in particular with the introduction of internet.
Now a days internet has become the most popular source of
information, which offers unlimited channels to transfer
information from one station to another.
Secured communication is an important issue for a
long time. Initially cryptography was created for keeping the
communication secured. In this method the content of
message is kept secret. But it is not enough in some cases and
secured existence of message becomes necessary. For this
purpose steganography is developed.
In cryptography, cipher text is generated using a
secret key over plain text, ciphering of text makes it
unreadable , only the one who knows the secret key can
decipher the message into plain text.
On the other hand steganography hides the message
itself so it cannot be seen. It is the art of invisible
communication and has been used in various forms for 2500
years.
The word steganography is derived from the greek
words stegos & grafia. stegos means cover and
grafia means writing. In this method text files, digital
images, paintings, videos, TCP/IP packets are used as cover to
hide the message.
Both steganography and cryptography are different
from each other but focused on same thing i.e. protecting the
information from unwanted parties.
But a single technology cannot be perfect. As once
the presence of hidden message is revealed the purpose of
steganography is partly defeated. Thus for increasing the
strength of steganography it can be combined with
cryptography.
These techniques have many applications in
computer science and other related fields. They are used to
protect credit card information, personal files, e-mails,
military messages, corporate data etc.
Steganography is a method of hiding the presence of the
message, there are various types of steganography which is as
follows:
Text
Image
Audio/Video
TCP/IP packets
Historically the most important method is hiding the
information into the text. There are number of techniques that
can be employed in text steganography which are as follows:
Word shifting coding
Feature coding
Open space method
Line shift coding
International Journal of Computer Trends and Technology (IJCTT) volume 4 Issue 6June 2013
ISSN: 2231-2803 http://www.ijcttjournal.org Page 1793

Semantic/Syntactic methods
A well known method is to hide in every

n
th
letter of
every word of text message. When different digital file
formats and internet comes into knowledge text
steganography decreased its importance. It is not used very
often since it has only a small no. of redundant data.
Images are more popular in steganography because of
large amount of redundant bits present in digital
representation of image. As compared to other files, images
are most commonly used as a cover object for steganography.
Different techniques used for this are explained in next
section.
Audio files used the same techniques as that of image
except masking, which exploits the properties of human ear to
hide information. A faint, but audible sound becomes
inaudible if another louder audible sound is present without
being noticed. A channel is created by this property to hide
information. Even though audio files are nearly equal to
images in steganographic potential, the large size of
significant audio files makes them less popular to use than
image. There are limitless media for hiding information.
II. RELATED WORK
Kaustubh Choudhary [21] presented paper on Image
Steganography and Global Terrorism. This paper
informs the reader how an innocent looking digital
image hides a deadly terrorist plan. It analyses the
strengths of image steganography and the reasons
why terrorists are relying on it. It also aims to
generate interest among the scientific community
about Image steganography so that experts from
multiple disciplines may join hands for devising
better steganalysis techniques against the global
terrorism. In this paper a basic digital image is
analyzed and based on this analysis an LSB based
steganographic algorithm is designed. Using this
algorithm a software is developed and its
performance is compared with various other
steganographic tools available on the internet. This
comparison shows us why steganography is so much
preferred by terrorists.

Chandramouli R., M. Kharrazi and N. Memon[13]
presented paper on Image Steganography and
Steganalysis: Concepts and Practice. The modern
formulation of steganography is often given in terms
of the prisoner's problem. In which Alice and Bob are
two persons who wish to communicate in order to
discuss an important plan. However, all
communication between them is examined by the
warden.

Prof. A. Khare and Pallavi Khare[2] JPEG
Compression Steganography & cryptography using
image adaptation technique. When working with
larger images having too much bits, it becomes
difficult to transmit them over an normal internet
connection. More techniques are required to reduce
the size of image for making display of an image
available in a reasonable amount of time.
Mathematical formulas are used to analyze and
reduce image data, which results in smaller file sizes.
The process of reducing file size is known as
compression. Two types of compression are there in
images i.e. lossy and lossless compression.

N.N. El-Emam[18] presented paper on Hiding a large
amount of data with high security using
steganography algorithm.

El-Emam, on the other
hand, proposed a steganography algorithm to hide a
large amount of data with high security. His
steganography algorithm is based on hiding a large
amount of data (image, audio, text) file inside a color
bitmap (bmp) image. In his research, the image will
be filtered and segmented where bits replacement is
used on the appropriate pixels. Random selection of
pixels are done instead of sequential.

Lisa M. Marvel, Charles G. Boncelet and Charles T.
Retter [22] Spread Spectrum Image Steganography.
This system hides and recovers a message of
substantial length within digital image while
maintaining the original image size and dynamic
range. The hidden message can be produced using
correct keys without any knowledge of the original
image.

Dr. Mohammed Abbas Fadhil Al-Husainy[10]
presented paper on Message Segmentation to
Enhance the Security of LSB Image Steganography.
Classic Least Significant Bit (LSB) steganography
technique is the most used technique to hide secret
information in the least significant bit of the pixels in
the stego-image. This paper tells a technique by
parting the secret message into set of segments, that
have same length (number of characters), and finds
those LSBs of pixels in the stego-image that are
matched to each segment. The main objective of this
technique is to reduce the number of LSBs that are
changed when replacing them with the bits of
characters in the secret message.

Rosziati Ibrahim and Teoh Suk Kua [20]: presents
paper on Steganography Algorithm to Hide Secret
Message inside an Image. Embedding information
into digital content without causing perceptual
degradation is process of hiding data. In data hiding,
three famous techniques that can be used are
cryptography, steganography and the last
watermarking. Steganography is defined as writing
way of covering in Greek. It includes any process
that deals with data or information within other data.
International Journal of Computer Trends and Technology (IJCTT) volume 4 Issue 6June 2013
ISSN: 2231-2803 http://www.ijcttjournal.org Page 1794

The major purpose is to prevent the detection of
hidden information.Research has been done on image
steganography during ancient Greek time where
ancient Greek follows tattooing a secret message on
the bald head of a messenger, and waits till his hair
grow back before sending him through enemy
territory. But this method was time consuming.

Avcibas, M. Kharrazi, N. Memon, and B. Sankur[6]
presents paper on Image steganalysis with binary
similarity measures. Much research has been done on
finding statistics that are able to distinguish between
cover and stego images obtained through different
embedding techniques. Presents a novel technique for
steganalysis of images that have been subjected to
embedding by steganographic algorithms. The last
two bits i.e. seventh and eight bits in an image are
used for the calculating the several binary similarity
measures. The basic idea is that the relationship
between the bits as well as the binary value of text
characteristics within the bit planes will differ
between a stego image and a cover image. These
revealing marks are used to develop a classifier that
can distinguish between stego and cover images.
Provide experimental results using some of the latest
steganographic algorithms.

Andrew D. Ker [4] presented paper on Steganalysis
of Embedding in Two Least-Significant Bits. This
paper proposes steganalysis methods for extensions
of least-significant bit (LSB) overwriting to both of
the two lowest bit planes in digital images: there are
two different embedding methods. The author detects
how detectors for standard LSB replacement can be
adapted to such embedding, and how the methods
that provides the most responsive channels for
standard LSB replacement, may be improved and
applied to make more sensitive purpose.

M. Warkentin, M.B. Schmidt, E. Bekkering[17],
Steganography and steganalysis. Research in hiding
data inside image using steganography technique has
been done by many researchers, for example
Warkentin et al. proposed an approach to hide data
inside the audiovisual files. In their steganography
algorithm, to hide data, the secret content has to be
hidden in a cover message.

III. TECHNIQUES

Numerous methods are used to hide information inside of
picture, audio and video files. The most common methods are
LSB..

Substitution-Replacing/Altering the LSB

Usually some bytes are there in the file that are not really
needed, or are not that much important.
Information that is to be hidden can be placed on position
of these bytes with out significantly altering the file or
damaging it. In least significant bit technique each character
of secret message is represented by 8 bits and least significant
bit of pixel in stego image is replaced by these bits.
This technique needs atleast (n*8) pixel in stego image if
the secret message has n characters. Suppose we want to hide
M with binary value 10010011 in a 3 pixels with values of
an image.
(10001101 11110011 11011010
00111011 10010001 10000010
10000011 10101011 10010010)
We will only replace the last bit of the pixel values like
(10001101 11110010 11011010
00111011 10010000 10000010
10000011 10101011 10010010)
We can see that only last 2 bits are changed and remaining
bits match the exiting pixel bits. By doing this only little
distortion occurs into the image which is unrecognizable by
the naked eye.
By this technique a person can make sure that no human
could detect the change in the file.
LSB techniques can be easily used with picture files
having different colors and that have a high resolution and
also with audio files that have many different sounds with
high bit rate. Size of the file is not usually increased by this
method, but depending on the size of the information that is to
be hidden inside the file, the file can become visibly fuzzy.

Transformation Domain Techniques

LSB technique is simple, easy to grasp and fast way to
hide the information. But this technique cant handle the
changes meant from image processing or lossy
compression.JPEG images have such compression as key
advantage over other formats. Using JPEG compression high
color quality images can be easily stored in relatively small
files.
DCT is most popular technique under this domain
because of image format, JPEG that is most commonly used
as it is most common output of digital cameras and for
compression this format uses the discrete cosine
transformation.
Embedding in DCT coefficient do not cause
noticeable visible effects and also do not cause
detectable statistical changes. There are various methods
developed to reduce the statistical artifacts introduced to DCT
coefficients. Few of them are
1.Outguess,
2. F5,
3. model based,
4. perturbed quantization.


International Journal of Computer Trends and Technology (IJCTT) volume 4 Issue 6June 2013
ISSN: 2231-2803 http://www.ijcttjournal.org Page 1795

1) Outguess:
It was proposed by provos includes embedding process in
two separate steps. First step was to identify the redundant
DCT coefficients with minimal effect on cover image and
second step to choose the bits from the information obtained
in first step in which to embed the message.







Fig. 1. Steps followed in Outguess
In this method only half of the bits were modified and
remaining half were used for preserving the original histogram
of DCT coefficients. The purpose of preserving the original
histogram was to overcome from the steganalysis attack that
look at changes in the DCT histogram after embedding.

2) F5:
It was proposed by westfeld. This method also modifies
the DCT coefficient for embedding the message as in
Outguess. But this method used matrix embedding with same
goal as that of Outguess i.e. to minimize the effect of changes
on DCT coefficient. In this method n coefficient were taken
by westfeld for hashing them to k bits. K and n depend upon
the original image as well as the length of the message. Next n
coefficients are chosen if the hashed value of first n equals the
message bits and similar



Otherwise =msg bits









Fig. 2. Steps followed in F5
procedure is followed till embedding completes. Otherwise
one of the n coefficients is modified and the hash is
recalculated. Modification depends upon the fact that the
resulting n DCT coefficients should not have hamming
distance of more than d
max
from the original n coefficients.
Until the hash value matches this process is repeated.

3) Model based Embedding Technique:

In this method statistical property of an image were
modeled preserved during embedding process. it was
proposed by sallee who breaks the coefficients into two parts
and places coded message bits in place of insignificant
components. Initially non zero coefficients were modeled with
parametric density function. To achieve this low precision
histogram of each frequency channel is obtained and the
model was fitted to each histogram by determining the
corresponding model parameters. Offset value of a coefficient
was defined within a histogram bin as a symbol and the
corresponding symbol probabilities were computed from the
relative frequencies of symbols.
In this embedding operation an arithmetic decoder was used
that takes the message signal as input and decodes it with
respect to measure symbol probabilities. After this the entropy
decoded message was embedded by specifying new bin offset
for each coefficient. On the other hand extraction was also
similar to embedding, for this entropy encoding the symbol
sequence was used.


4) Perturbed Quantization:

This technique has a different approach from the previous
ones. In this technique message is embedded when cover
image undergoes compression. It was proposed by Fridrich. In
this technique a lower quality factor was used to recompress
the JPEG image, where only selected DCT coefficient were
modified those could be quantized to an alternative bin with
an error smaller than some present value. The problem in this
method is to choose the coefficient for embedding so that
detector can also determine the coefficient carrying the
payload. For this random matrix is used as side information.
Image is broken into blocks of smaller sizes to speed up the
embedding process and the system is solved independently for
each block. The drawback of this method is additional
overhead, but this should be embedded in each block for
successful message extraction.


MASKING AND FILTERING

Gray scale images and 24 bit images are used for masking
and filtering. For hiding information this technique used to
mark the image same as that of paper watermarks. There may
be no fear of image destruction due to lossy compression in
watermarking, because they are more integrated into the
image.
By definition the watermarks that are visible is not
steganography as steganography hides the information
whereas watermarks extend the information and become an
attribute of the cover image.
Copyright, ownership, or license are the some
information that are kept by digital watermark. In this method
cover image is used for communication in place of hidden
message as used in steganography.
In this method luminance of the image is increased with
higher percentage to make the watermark detectable by human
eye.
Robustness of this method is more as compare to LSB
insertion with respect to compression, cropping and some
1. Identify redundant bits
2. Choose bits for embedding
Take n coeff.
Hash to
K bits
Modify
1 of n
coeff.
Choos
e next
n bits
Recalculate
the hash
International Journal of Computer Trends and Technology (IJCTT) volume 4 Issue 6June 2013
ISSN: 2231-2803 http://www.ijcttjournal.org Page 1796

image processing. A significant area is used to embed the
information to make the hidden message more integral than
just hiding it in the noise level.
This quality makes it more suitable as compared to LSB
with, for instance, lossy JPEG images.


IV. CONCLUSION

This research presented a background of Steganography and a
comparative study of some steganography techniques.
Steganography as information security system can have some
useful applications, like other seemingly related system
(cryptography). The purpose of this study is to identify the
reliable and best technique.

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