THE UNIVERSITY OF TENNESSEE

ECE 572
Digital Image Processing

Project #3
Steganography Implementation

Instructor:

Dr. Qi

Student:

Getao Liang

December 10, 2005

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Abstract:
Steganography is derived from the Greek for covered writing and essentially means
to hide in plain sight. It is the art and science of communicating in such a way that
the presence of a message cannot be detected. As other image processing technologies,
steganography can also be applied on both spatial domain and frequency domain. In
this project, I will discuss the theory and implementation of two simple schemes for
steganography, which are LSB technique and transform domain technique. By
evaluation the techniques with both text and image message, I try to show the
different performance produced by these two algorithm with different parameters.
Besides, I also try to test the robustness against JPEG lossy compression for DCT
scheme to prove the correctness of the theory and my implementation. All the results
from the experiments support my assumption and the theoretical analysis.

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I. Introduction
With the rapid development of the world integration in economy and culture,
communication between people in different continents plays an important role. Since
information is the most important thing within the communication, methods are
proposed to secure the confidential content from undesired observer. The technologies
for this purpose can be divided into two main categories, Cryptography and
Steganography. The main difference between these two technologies is the
appearance of the processed data, or results. Cryptography tries to find algorithms to
encode the information into sort of random data that is unknowable to unauthorized
receivers. However any receiver can tell there is hidden information existed within the
object they received from the strange and unreadable appearance, even though no one
can know the exact secret message except the one with decoder.
Steganography is derived from the Greek for covered writing and essentially means
to hide in plain sight. It is the art and science of communicating in such a way that
the presence of a message cannot be detected. That means, different to cryptography,
steganography deals with not only hiding information from undesired receiver, but
also preventing the understand of the very existence of the hiding message from
enemy, who might touches the processed cover by any chance, including passive,
active and malicious receiver.
A few criteria and requirements are used to measure the efficient of a steganographiy
technique. The first one is imperceptibility, which requires the results to be unaware
by receivers with advanced analysis technologies, such as statistical analysis and
high-pass filter analysis. This is the most important, when you are facing active or
malicious attackers, who would have great resource to apply analysis and break to the
cover. Security is another important factor, which concerns more on the difficulties of
perform inverse performance on the cover to get the hidden message. Capacity is used
to describe maximum amount the secure data a cover can hold. The last thing is the
robustness against cover modification, malicious modification or lossy compression.
But it is impossible to satisfy all the requirements at the same time, so it is for the
designer to trade-off between them to find a most optimized scheme for preferred
circumstance.
People have been using different steganographiy technologies for many fields
covering from civilian communication to military secret information exchange, ever
since old ages. The demand of security in modern electrical communication boosts the
development of steganographiy. There are many techniques for steganographiy,
including substitution systems, transformed domain techniques and statistical
steganography. The first one is a most simple method, but it is easy to be decoded or
destroyed. The last two technologies are both applied on the supraliminal channels of
the cover, which makes it harder to be destroyed without great distortion on the cover.

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II. Technical Approach

All the steganographiy techniques can be treated as two categories based on what
channel the method used to hide the secret message. One of them is substitution
system or bitplane tool, which uses the lease significant bits (LSB) in the cover data.
The other one is applied to supraliminal channels of the cover, which are the main
construction of the cover. Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) technique is one of them.
Following, I will talk about the two important technique mentioned in detail. To fully
understand the processing mechanism of different steganographiy algorithms, I used
c++ programming language to implement and simulate LSB and DCT techniques with
secret message in the form of both image and plain text. The cover I choose is an
black and white image (lena.pgm, 512x512). In order to exam the efficiency of the
algorithm, I use MATLAB to perform some analysis. Also the results of analysis will
make you have a better visual explanation on the difference. I used image library of
version 3 from Dr. Qi.

1. Least Significant Bit (LSB) Technique

Least significant bit approach, which apply LSB insertion and noise manupulation
is common in steganograpgy and is relatively easy to apply in image and audio. A
surprising amount of information can be hidden in the cover image, but with only
little perceptible impact to the appearance of the carrier. This technique utilizes the
property of the digitalized form of cover data. As for a normal 8-bit data, some
portion of the bits play more important role than the others do.
As can be seen from Figure 1, the 7-bit located in the left is called Most
Significant Bit (MSB), and the 0-bit on the right is referred to Least Significant
Bit (LSB). Of course, the significant between the bits are relative to each others.
The 5-bit is more significant than the 4-bit, but less significant than the 6-bit.
Usually the higher level bits contribute great to represent the information
contained, and the lower level bits always contain noise. Thanks to this property,
we can hide messenger in the bits, where are always occupied by noise, such that
the attacker might ignore them and fail to be aware the information hidden in the
cover.
7-bit 6-bit 5-bit 4-bit 3-bit 2-bit 1-bit 0-bit

MSB

LSB

Figure-1. 8-bit data

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To hide more information of the secret message, we need to replace the LSBs of
the cover with same length of MSBs of the secret message. For an 8-bit cover, we
now have at lease seven bits to be replaced by the secret message. Figure 2 shows
the cases of different bits used in the scheme. More bits we used for the message
means more capacity, more robust against cover modification, but greater damage
to the appearance of the cover, so less imperceptibility or security of the scheme.
7-bit 6-bit 5-bit 4-bit 3-bit 2-bit 1-bit 0-bit
Cover

7-bit 6-bit 5-bit 4-bit 3-bit 2-bit 1-bit 0-bit

Message

7-bit 6-bit 5-bit 4-bit 3-bit 2-bit 1-bit 7-bit

LSB Coded (1 bit)
7-bit 6-bit 5-bit 4-bit 7-bit 6-bit 5-bit 4-bit
LSB Coded (4 bit)
7-bit 7-bit 6-bit 5-bit 4-bit 3-bit 2-bit 1-bit
LSB Coded (4 bit)

Figure-2. LSB encode cases

Once you made the decision on how many bits to be replaced, you can continue to
find a scheme to select the bytes we used to hide the information of secret
message. In this step, it is very important to take the probability or distribution of
the original data into account. The secret message is always far shorter than the
carrier. Lets consider a very simple selection method, which uses the bytes from
the very beginning of the cover with the same length of the secret message.
Because of the added hidden information, the data distribution of the first portion
of the processed cover is various from other parts. So it is very easy for the
attacker with sufficient analysis tools to break the hidden information.
One simple way to avoid this problem is to extend the secret message to the same
size as the cover by inserting random bits before performing the secret writing. So
the distributions of different portions will tend to be so similar that it is not so easy
to be cracked. But if the attackers have priori knowledge of the distribution pattern
of the cover, they can easy detect the different between original cover and the
stego-cover caused by the secret information and random noise. Some more

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complicated techniques can help to solve this problem.
Besides statistic analysis, another method the attackers always used for analysis is
Laplacian high-pass filter. Lets take image processing as example. HP filter is
used to detect edges in image by performing second-order differential operation to
neighbor pixels, the mechanism of which can be shown by the following equation.
2 f ( x, y ) = f ( x + 1, y ) + f ( x 1, y ) + f ( x, y + 1) + f ( x, y 1) 4 f ( x, y )
For a normal image, edges are only located in small portion of the whole image.
So, the intensity histogram of the HP filtered original image should be
concentrated around zero. However, for stego-image, due to the hidden
information substituted, the different between neighbor pixels become larger than
it was, so the selection method mentioned on last paragraph is not imperceptions
to advanced attackers at all.

Figure-3. (a)Histogram of HPed covers, (b)Histogram of HPed stego-images

Thats why a more sophisticated approach is introduced, called random interval
method, which use a pseudorandom generator to spread the secret message over
the entire cover in a rather random manner. To use this method, both part of the
communication should share a stego-key k used as a seed for generation, and also
the equation to generate pseudorandom sequence k1 , , k m , and the
corresponding interval j1 , , j m .
k n = f (k n 1 ) ;
j1 = k1

and

j n = k n 1 + k n

In my program, for simplicity, I used the simplest generator equations: k n = k

and j n = j n 1 + k n . The performance should be the same as the above equations.
So the encoder and decoder algorithms for the LSB technique with random

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interval method are list below, where k m and j m are m-th pseudorandom
number and interval, M(m) is m-th message, C(i,j) and S(i,j) are intensity of cover
pixel and stego-image pixel.
Algorithm-1: LSB Encoder
Generate random sequence k m using k1
Calculate random interval sequence j m
for all cover pixels
if (i,j) match j m then
S(i,j) = (C(i,j)_LSB <- M(m))
else
S(i,j)=C(i,j)
end if
m++
end for

Algorithm-2: LSB Decoder

Generate random sequence k m using k1
Calculate random interval sequence j m
for all stego-image pixels
if (i,j) match j m then
M(m) = S(i,j)_LSB
end if
m++
end for

2. Transform Domain Technique (TDT)

Though the LSB technique is an easy way to embed secret information in cover
image without changing the original appearance a lot, its fatal disadvantage is that
a slight modification or processing, such as denoising, lossy compression and
smoothing on the stego-image might easily destroy the hiding message. To hide
the secret information in the frequency domain, in stead of in the time/spatial
domain, can solve the problem. Different from LSB technique, it hides
information in the significant area of the transform domain to achieve higher
robust to cover modification, including compression, cropping, and some image

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processing. At the same time of providing great robust, transform domain
technique also try to cause less noticeable visual difference, which means good
imperceptibility.
Discrete Cosine Transform is one of the methods of transform domain. The
advantages of DCT to other transform include simple algorithm and real number
operation. These benefits make it a most popular technique for steganograpgy for
image.
S (u , v) =

N 1 N 1
u (2i + 1)
v(2 j + 1)
2
A(u ) A(v) s (i, j ) cos(
) cos(
)
N
2N
2N
i
j

s (u , v) =

2
N

N 1 N 1

A(u ) A(v)S (u, v) cos(

u

u (2i + 1)
2N

) cos(

v(2 j + 1)
2N

1
k =0

where A(u ) = 2
1 otherwise

Just like Fourier Transform, DCT is reversible, so we can first perform DCT to an
cover image, then do apply some kind of algorithm to secret write information on
the significant area of the transform domain, and perform the inverse transform to
the modified data set.
TDT with DCT is designed concerned the specification of JPEG, so the result
produced by TDT with DCT technique can survive JPEG lossy compression
greatly. The following figures (Figure-4 and -5) show the encoder and decoder
procedures of one of the popular steganograpgy techniques using DCT and its
inverse transform.
Cover

Divide into
8x8Divide
blocksinto
Divide into
8x8 blocks
8x8 blocks

DCT to selected
block
Message

Stego-Image

Combine all
blocks

iDCT to each
block

Figure-4. DCT encoder diagram

Message embed
algorithm

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Stego-Image
Divide into
8x8Divide
blocksinto
Divide into
8x8 blocks
8x8 blocks
DCT to selected
block
Message
Message decode
algorithm

Figure-5. DCT decoder diagram

Knowing the basic procedures of TDT technique, we now focus more on the
embedding and extraction algorithms, that perform core roles of the
steganograpgy, located in encoder and decoder respectively.
To design the algorithms to hide information in the frequency domain, we need to
first understand how DCT coefficients represent the image information, and the
quantization mechanism of JPEG. The knowledge from these fields tell us that, by
switching a few DCT coefficients, which is selected based on the quantization rule,
will not change the carrier appearance a lot. So we can store 1 bit secret
information on one DCT-transformed image block by the relative amount of 2 or
more DCT coefficients. Exchange the coefficients with each other, when it
dis-obeys the designed rule when embedding secret bits. The encoding and
decoding algorithms can be designed as follow, where mi is the i-th message bit,
bi is the selected block for i-th message bit, Bi is bi s CDT, and (u1 , v1 ) &
(u 2 , v 2 ) are the two designed coefficient pair.

Algorithm-3: TDT_CDT Encoder

for all message bit mi
choose selected block

Bi = CDT (bi )
if mi <0 then
if Bi (u1 , v1 ) > Bi (u 2 , v 2 ) then

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swep Bi (u1 , v1 ) and Bi (u 2 , v 2 )
end if
else
if Bi (u1 , v1 ) Bi (u 2 , v 2 ) then
swep Bi (u1 , v1 ) and Bi (u 2 , v 2 )
end if
end if
adjust both values so that | Bi (u1 , v1 ) Bi (u 2 , v 2 ) |> x

b ' i = iCDT ( B ' i )

end for
'

create stego-image out of all b i

Algorithm-4: TDT_DCT Decoder

for all selected block Bi

'

B ' i = CDT (b ' i )

if Bi (u1 , v1 ) > Bi (u 2 , v 2 ) then

mi =1
else

mi =0
end if
end for

The value adjusting of the encoder used to enhance the robust against cover
modification, the higher x is, the higher robust the algorithm gets, but less
imperceptive. Based on the quantization values used in the JPEG compression
scheme, I choose the B(4,1) and B(3,2) to be the coefficient pair used for storage
of hiding message, since the quantization level of these two coefficients are the
same. So this selection performs very well for JPEG compression.

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III. Experiments and Results

1. Least Significant Bit (LSB) Technique
Secret message can be in various forms, such as plain text, image, sound or any other
digitized form. In this project, I am trying to implement the LSB technique to hide
both plain text and image, in order to fully test the efficient and applicability of the
algorithms. Two algorithms were created. One is a simple LSB technique with
continuous selection of elements to hide message, and the other one is a more
sophisticated scheme that applied pseudorandom interval method. Both algorithms
will be tested with text and image secret message. The test results are shown below
for better illustration. Besides, I used a MATLAB program to calculate SNR between
the cover-image and the stego-image to give a numerical comparison between the
results of different schemes or same schemes with different parameters.
a. Short Text Message
To give a better view of the performance of the algorithm, cases with different
parameters are performed. For simplicity of the report, only 3 significant cases are
given for text message. Detail information will be given in the part of testing
image message. Text message is totally different from the image, because of their
property. The secret message is Hello World. And the cover image I choose is a
97x128 PGM file from the internet, which is shown as Figure-6. The histogram of
the cover image and the high-pass filtered cover are also shown below in Figure-7.

Figure-6. Cover Image

Figure-7. Histogram of Cover and HPed-Cover

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As mentioned above, the MSBs of image contribute more than the LSBs in most
cases. So only portion of the MSBs can give the viewer a approximation of the
original image. But it is not true for plain text; change on any bit of the character
8-bit representation will be decoded to another character. So it is important to hide
all bit data of the text message into the cover. In my program, the 8-bit data are
divided into signal bit and each of them will be embedded in one selected cover
pixel. So that 8 pixels for each of 12 characters needs 72 pixels as cover elements.
Also for comparison, I will prove results from cases with hiding only 2 and 7
MSBs of the character. The program output is list below for all cases.
Input secrect message text is:
Hello World.
Case#1 8 bits:
Decoded text message text is:
Hello World.
Decoded DEC message in DEC is: 72 101 108 108 111 32 87 111 114 108 100 46
Case#2 7 bits:
Decoded text message text is:
Hdlln Vnrld.
Decoded DEC message in DEC is: 72 100 108 108 110 32 86 110 114 108 100 46
Case#3 2 bits:
Decoded text message text is:
@@@@@ @@@@@
Decoded DEC message in DEC is: 64 64 64 64 64 0 64 64 64 64 64 0

(a)
(b)
(c)
Figure-8. Stego-image for hiding 8, 7 and 2 MSBs
The SNRs for the above 3 cases are around 45.1375 dB. That is because only one
LSB of the cover are replaced by the secret message bit, and another reason is that
the secret message are pretty small in size, only 12 bytes.
The above results prove the implemented program can successfully embedding
and extract short secret text message in to image. Of course, we expect it is also
true for long text message, which will be tested in the following section.

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b. Long Text Message
Basically, the case for long text message is pretty similar to those for the short
message. However, since the longer secret message, we can have some more
visual perception of the algorithm from detail and difference images between
cover and stego-image. For this case, I chose a long enough paragraph from New
York Times randomly. So it should be strong enough to represent any readable text
message in the world. One problem, the linux command line did response to some
special symbol, such as !, / and *. So I have no choice but to skip them.

(b)
(a)
Figure-9. (a). Stego-image using simple scheme; (b).Difference between cover and
stego-image;

Figure-10. Histogram of Cover and HPed-Cover

(a)
(b)
(b)
Figure-11. Other results with different parameters. (a). Diff-image for
2000 displacement of first cover element; (b)-(c). Diff-image using
random interval scheme with key=2 and key=3 ;

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Figure-12. Histogram of Cover and HPed-Cover for case from Figure11(c)

Though the histograms of the cover form both cases are pretty the same as that of
the original one, the histograms for HPed-cover for case 2, which is shown in
Figure-11(c) and Figure-12, looks closer to that of the cover than that of the other
case. That contributes to the efficient immunity to Laplasian analysis of the
random interval method, by trading the cost of algorithm complexity and
pre-communication between encoder and decoder for keys and equations. The
SNRs for the above 4 cases are 31.0206 dB, 32.6937 dB, 34.3686 dB and
35.5778dB. You might notice that the SNR is improved greatly from case1 to
case4. Thats also the advantage of the random interval method.

c. Image Message
For better visual interpretation, I used a larger image, 512x512 lena.pgm, for
cover image, and two message images, one with same size of the cover, 512x512
barbara.pgm, and one with smaller size, 97x128 fig1.pgm.

Figure-13. Cover, Message#1 and Message#2

The reason I choose to use 2 message images is mainly to test the full 8-bit data
embedding for lossless image steganography, which makes it impossible to embed
the message into a cover with a size less than 8 times larger than that of message.

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First we will test the simple scheme first with embedding message information
from 1 bit to 7 bits. The stego-images and the decoded message images for all
cases are shown below for comparison.
Case#1: 1 bit LSB Case

Case#2: 2 bit LSB Case

Case#3: 3 bit LSB Case

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Case#4: 4 bit LSB Case

Case#5: 5 bit LSB Case

Case#6: 6 bit LSB Case

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Case#7: 7 bit LSB Case

Figure-14. Stego-images and Decoded Message for 7 cases

From the stego-images of all cases in figure-14, we can find that the quality of
stego-image is getting worse and worse when the number of used LSBs increases.
On the other hand, the decode images are getting more and more matching in
quality compared to the original message. This means that the more LSBs used
for secret writing causes more capacity and accuracy, but less imperceptivity. The
designer should trade-off these parameters for different purpose. To illustrate the
imperceptivity of different cases, the histograms of the stego-images of case1 and
case7 are listed below. The different shape of the 4th picture tells us that the
difference between neighbor pixels in the stego-image is far greater than that of
case1, which means case7 is less imperceptivity than case1. This conclusion
matches the one we derived from observing the stego-images.

Figure-15. Histogram of Cover and HPed-Cover for case1 and case7

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Next, we will exam the random interval method used in LSB technique. As we
mentioned above, we use a smaller size image as secret message, and try to
embed the full 8-bit data of each pixel into the same cover image. For comparison,
we will perform two simulations with key equals to 1 and 2.

------------------------------

Figure-16. Stego-image, decoded message, difference image and histogram of

Cover and HPed-Cover for case of key = 1 and key = 2.

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2. Transform Domain Technique
Just as what was done for the LSB technique, I will try to exam the transform domain
steganograpgy with discrete cosine transform by embedding both plain text and image
message. For text message, I use the same one as for LSB scheme, which is Hello
World. However, since full data embedding is applied for transform domain
technique and each 8x8 image block is used to secret write one bit of message, we
need to make sure the cover are 8x8x8 times larger in size than the message. Since the
evaluation of the algorithm are the same as the LSB scheme, we will focus more on
showing result images rather than to explain the cause.
a. Plain Text Message
For simplicity and better visual results, I only examed the scheme with the short
text message and a small size cover image, 256x256 cameraman.pgm, which is
listed below with the results.

Input secrect message text is:

Hello World.
Decoded text message text is:
Hello World.
Decoded DEC message in DEC is: 72 101 108 108 111 32 87 111 114 108 100 46

Figure-17. Cover Image, Stego-image and difference image

From the results image, we can see that it is hardly to find any noticeable changes
between the stego-image and the cover image. And the beautiful mono difference
image again prove the conclusion that, by using transform domain technique, we
can embed secret data into cover without changing too much of the appearance of
the carrier, while providing more robust to other forms of modification.
b. Image Message
Next, lets work on the scheme with image message. The message image (zoomed)
I generated for the test purpose, 16x16 UT.pgm, is shown below.

Figure-18. Message Image

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For this section, I use a 512*512 lena.pgm as test image, which have been already
shown for the former sections. The recovered message image and the difference
image between the cover and the stego-image are shown below.

Figure-19. Recovered message(zoomed), Stego-image and difference image

Again, we cannot tell any difference between the stego-image and the cover
image, and this is also supported by the mono-black difference image between the
cover and the stego-image. You might notice the difference image in this section
is black while that of the previous section is something white. This is caused by
the auto-rescale function from the image library I used and the quantization
process when the c++ program was performing the DCT and IDCT. However, the
monochrome diff-image indicates the small difference between two images.
As we mention before, the DCT scheme has a good performance in surviving the
JPEG lossy compression. Now, I will try to compress the stego-image with 80%,
85%, 90% and 95% JPEG qualities respectively, and then try to recover the secret
image we embedded. And the results are listed below, whose qualities are from
worst to best, when the compression rates rising. We can still easily recognized
the shape from the 3rd and 4th recovered message, but not for the first 2 images.

Figure-19. Recovered message(zoomed), for 80%, 85%, 90% and 95%

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IV. Conclusion
In this project, I have gone through the comprehensive step on steganography in both
spatial domain and frequency domain. The results indicated the algorithm on bith
domains can finish the steganography task greatly, given there is not active or
malicious attacker involved.
For LSB technique, we can use a few MSBs of the message to substitute the same
length LSBs of the cover. And the number of LSBs to be replace for the secret
message determines the quality of recovered image. This is only true to message in
form of sound or image, but not true for text message. All 8 bits must be embedded
for the successful recovery of message. Besides, the selection algorithm of cover
elements is very important when there are active attackers existed. By choosing the
selection scheme carefully, we can manage to make the distribution of the
stego-image look like the original one.
The transform domain technique is much better than the LSB scheme by higher
imperceptive, more security and more robust to cover modification. But the cost for
this improvement is the algorithm complexity. The result told me that using DCT
scheme for secret writing; the image message can be recovered approximately in
some degree even though the stego-image is compressed by JPEG.

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V. Reference
Digital Image Processing Rafael C. Gonzalez & Richard E.Woods

Information hiding techniques for steganography and digital watermarking

- Stefan Katzenbeisser, Fabien A.P. Petitcolas, editors. Boston : Artech House, 2000.
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~mdr/teaching/modules03/security/students/SS5/Steganogr
aphy.htm
http://www.zenith.com/sub_hdtv/mpeg_tutorial/DCxfrm.HTM
http://www.wepin.com/pgp/stego.html