Enhancement of Image Steganography Using Compression Techniques

ABSTRACT 

In a world of digital technology, maintaining the security of the secret data has become a great challenge. One way to achieve this is to encrypt the message before it is sent. But encryption draws the attention of third parties, which may cause the third party to seek to break the encryption and to detect the original message. Another way is steganography, steganography is the art and science of writing hidden Messages in such a way that no one, apart from the sender and intended recipient, Suspects the existence of the message. In this research apply Multilevel Steganography for image steganography was presented. MLS consists of at least two steganography methods utilized respectively. Two levels of steganography have been applied; the first level is called (the upper-level), and it has been applied using enhanced LSB (secure LSB-L1) image steganography, the secret data in this level are English text, and the cover is Bitmap image, the output is a stego_image called (intermediate image). And the second level is called (the lower-level); it has been applied using another enhance LSB (secure LSB-L2) based image steganography. In this level, another Bitmap (BMP) image has been used as a cover image and embeds (the BMP image output from level one) as a secure data and generates the new BMP image as stego image. A lossless data compression technique using Huffman, LZW algorithm and Winrar Application between the First and Second levels of steganography are applied. The improved embedding capacity of the image possible due to preprocessing the stego-images from level one in which lossless data compression techniques are applied After completing the proposed method implementation, many experiments have been conducted. Different sizes of secret messages and different sizes of cover images have been experimenting. Finally, comparative analysis of compression has been done on parameters of Quality Image Measurement like MSE, PSNR to experiment results and presented good results for the proposed method.

TABLES OF CONTENTS

I ................................................................................................ آيـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــه

II .....................................................................................................الحمــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــد

DEDICATION..................................................................................................................III

AKNOWLEDAGEMENT................................................................................................IV

LIST OF TABLES.............................................................................................................X

LIST OF FIGURES ..........................................................................................................XI

ABSTRACT ...................................................................................................................XV

XVI..........................................................................................................................المستخلص

CHAPTER ONE.................................................................................................................1

INTRODUCTION ..............................................................................................................1

1.1 BACKGROUND ..........................................................................................................2

1.2 PROBLEM STATEMENT...........................................................................................3

1.3 PROPOSE SOLUTION................................................................................................3

1.4 RESEARCH SCOPE....................................................................................................4

1.5 OBJECTIVE OF THE RESEARCH ............................................................................6

1.6 RESEARCH QUESTIONS ..........................................................................................6

1.7 RESEARCH METHODOLOGY AND TOOLS..........................................................6

1.7 RESEARCH ORGANIZATION..................................................................................7

CHAPTER 2 .......................................................................................................................8

LITERATURE REVIEW AND RELATED WORK.........................................................8

2.1 OVERVIEW.................................................................................................................9

2.2 METHODS FOR HIDING INFORMATION. ...........................................................10

2.2.1 HIDING IN TEXT ...................................................................................................10

2.2.2 HIDING IN DISK SPACE.........................................................................................10

2.2.3 HIDING IN NETWORK PACKETS ............................................................................10

2.2.4 HIDING IN SOFTWARE AND CIRCUITRY ................................................................11

2.2.5 HIDING IN IMAGE AND AUDIO ..............................................................................11

2.3 CRYPTOGRAPHY AND STEGANOGRAPHY. .....................................................13

2.4 GENERAL STEGANOGRAPHY SYSTEMS...........................................................14

2.5 CHARACTERIZATION OF STEGANOGRAPHY SYSTEMS...............................14

2.5.1 CAPACITY ............................................................................................................15

2.5.2 ROBUSTNESS ........................................................................................................15

2.5.3 UNDETECTABLE ...................................................................................................15

2.5.4 INVISIBILITY (PERCEPTUAL TRANSPARENCY) ......................................................15

2.5.5 SECURITY.............................................................................................................16

2.6 CLASSIFICATION OF STEGANOGRAPHY TECHNIQUES................................16

2.6.1 SUBSTITUTION SYSTEMS ......................................................................................16

2.6.1.1 Least Significant Bit Substitution (LSB).....................................................17

2.6.1.2 Pseudorandom Permutation.........................................................................17

2.6.1.3 Image Downgrading and Cover Channels...................................................17

2.6.1.4 Cover Regions and Parity Bits ....................................................................17

2.6.1.5 Palette-Based Image ....................................................................................18

2.6.2 TRANSFORM DOMAIN TECHNIQUES .....................................................................18

2.6.3 SPREAD SPECTRUM (SS) TECHNIQUES .................................................................19

2.6.4 DISTORTION TECHNIQUES ....................................................................................19

2.6.5 COVER GENERATION TECHNIQUES.......................................................................20

2.6.6 STATISTICAL STEGANOGRAPHY ...........................................................................22

2.7 TYPES OF STEGANOGRAPHY:.............................................................................22

2.8 STEGANOGRAPHY ADVANTAGES AND DISADVANTAGES ........................24

2.9 IMAGE STEGANOGRAPHY ...................................................................................25

2.10 MULTILEVEL STEGANOGRAPHY (MLS).........................................................25

2.11 DATA COMPRESSION ..........................................................................................27

2.12 TYPES OF DATA COMPRESSION.......................................................................28

2.12.1 LOSSY DATA COMPRESSION...............................................................................28

2.12.2 LOSSLESS DATA COMPRESSION .........................................................................29

2.13 LOSSLESS VS. LOSSY COMPRESSION .............................................................30

2.14 HUFFMAN ALGORITHM......................................................................................31

2.14.1 ACHIEVABLE HUFFMAN COMPRESSION OF STATES .............................................32

2.15 LZW ALGORITHM.................................................................................................33

2.15.1 LZ77 ALGORITHM..............................................................................................33

2.15.2 LZSS ALGORITHM .............................................................................................34

2.15.3 LZ78 ALGORITHM..............................................................................................35

2.15.4 LZW ALGORITHM..............................................................................................36

2.16 WINRAR COMPRESSION ....................................................................................38

2.16.1 LZSS..................................................................................................................39

2.16.2 PPMII................................................................................................................39

2.16.3 INTEL IA-32 .......................................................................................................40

2.16.4 DELTA ENCODES ................................................................................................40

2.17 LITERATURE SURVEY.........................................................................................40

2.18 CONCLUSION.........................................................................................................44

2.19 RELATED WORKS.................................................................................................45

CHAPTER THREE ..........................................................................................................53

PROPOSED SYSTEM ANALYSIS AND WORK ENVIRONMENT...........................53

3.1 OVERVIEW...............................................................................................................54

3.2 PROPOSED METHOD..............................................................................................54

3.3 THE ALGORITHM PROCESS .................................................................................56

3.3.1 LEVEL ONE PROCESS ............................................................................................56

3.3.1.1 Steps Embedding Process in level one using Modified LSB (secure LSBL1) .................................................57

3.3.1.2 Steps extracting Process in level one using Modified LSB (secure LSB-L1)......................................................59

3.3.2 SPREAD THE INFORMATION OVER THE IMAGES .....................................................61

3.3.2.1 Process of carrier unit..................................................................................61

3.3.3 LEVEL TOW PROCESS ...........................................................................................62

3.3.3.1 Steps Embedding Process in level tow using Modified LSB (secure LSBL2) .........................................64

3.3.3.2 Steps extracting Process in level Tow using Modified LSB (secure LSBL2) ...................................65

3.3.4 COMPRESSION PROCESS USING HUFFMAN ALGORITHM........................................66

3.3.5 DECOMPRESSION PROCESS USING HUFFMAN ALGORITHM ...................................67

3.3.6 COMPRESSION PROCESS USING LZW ALGORITHM ...............................................69

3.3.7 DECOMPRESSION PROCESS USING LZW ALGORITHM ...........................................70

CHAPTER 4 .....................................................................................................................73

RESULT AND DISCUSSION.........................................................................................73

4-1 RESULT.....................................................................................................................74

4-2 QUALITY IMAGE MEASUREMENT.....................................................................74

4-2-1 MEAN SQUARED ERROR (MSE): .........................................................................74

4-2-2 PEAK SIGNAL TO NOISE RATIO (PSNR):...............................................................74

4-2-3 NORMALIZED CROSS CORRELATION (NCC):........................................................75

4-2-4 AVERAGE DIFFERENCE (AD):..............................................................................75

4-2-5 STRUCTURAL CONTENT (SC): .............................................................................75

4-2-6 MAXIMUM DIFFERENCE (MD): ...........................................................................75

4-2-7 NORMALIZED ABSOLUTE ERROR (NAE): ............................................................75

CHAPTER 5 .....................................................................................................................89

CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORKS.......................................................................89

5.1 CONCLUSION...........................................................................................................90

5.2 RECOMMENDATIONS............................................................................................91

5.3 FUTURE WORK........................................................................................................91

REFERENCES .................................................................................................................93