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International Journal Of Engineering And Computer Science ISSN:2319-7242
Volume 3 Issue 7 July, 2014 Page No. 7341-7345

An Overview of Image Steganography Techniques

Amritpal Singh1 , Satinder Jeet Singh2
1
Guru Kashi University, Department of CSE,
Talwandi Sabo, Punjab, India
[email protected]
2
Guru Kashi University, Department of CSE,
Talwandi Sabo, Punjab, India
[email protected]

Abstract: Steganography is becoming an important area of research in recent years. It is an art and the science of embedding information
into cover image viz., text , video, audio or multimedia content for military communication, authentication and many other purposes. It
deals with the ways of hiding the communication message and its existence from the unintended user. In image steganography, secret
communication is achieved through embedding a message into an image as cover file and generates a stego-image having hidden
information. There are several image steganography techniques are used each have its pros and cons. This paper discusses various image
steganography techniques such as Least significant bit, Discrete wavelet transformation, Pixel value differencing, Discrete cosine
transformation, Masking and filtering etc.
Keywords: Steganography, stego-image, Spatial domain methods, Transform domain techniques, Distortion techniques.
Image steganography is the process of hiding the sensitive
1. Introduction information into the cover image with no degradation of the

With the development of computer and the rise of internet, the image and providing better security so that unauthorized user
information is easily transferred from one location to another. cannot access the hidden information. Figure 1 shows the
But in some cases it is needed to keep the information must various image steagnography techniques. Image steganography
travel secretly. One of the grounds discussed in information techniques are broadly classified into following-
security is the exchange of information through the cover
media. Many different techniques like cryptography, encryption
etc. have been developed to encrypt and decrypt information in
order to keep the contents of message secret. But
steganography have an advantage over these techniques, it
keeps the existence of the message secret as well as secret the
information [1].
Steganography is the process of hiding the one information
into other sources of information like text, image, audio or
video file, so that it is not visible to the natural view.
Steganography is the art and science of invisible
communication of messages by hiding information into other
information. In image steganography the information is
embedded into innocent looking cover image and the message
implanted image is called a stego-image [2]. In history there
are several secret communication methods are used like
undetectable inks , microdots , character organization , digital
signatures, spread spectrum etc. that conceal the existence of
information. But now days digital approaches are used so the Figure 1: Various Image Steganography Techniques.
steganography is mostly used on digital data. There are various
steganography techniques used based on the information to be 2.1 Spatial Domain Methods
hidden. In this paper we describe brief review of several image
steganography techniques. In spatial domain steganography method, for hiding the data
. some bits are directly changed in the image pixel values. Most
2. Image Steganography Techniques used method in this category is least significant bit .Spatial
domain techniques are classified into following-

Amritpal Singh, IJECS Volume 3 Issue 7 month July, year 2014Page No.7341-7345 Page 7341
 Ik+1 which decides how many bits can be hidden in pixel
2.1.1 Least Significant Bit (LSB) block. When extracting the embedded data from stego-image
original range table is required.
LSB insertion is a common and simple approach for This method is proposed to enhance the embedding
embedding information in a cover file. Digital images used as capacity without improper visual changes in stego-image. But
cover file are mainly of two types- 24-bit images and 8-bit the disadvantage of the method is sometimes the pixel value in
images. In 24-bit images we can embed three bits of the stego-image may exceed the range 0-255 which leads to
information in each pixel. In 8-bit images, one bit of improper visualization of the stego image. It has also weak
information can be hidden into images. After applying the LSB security performance due to non-adaptive quantization,
algorithm the image obtained having secret message is called embedding some information in smooth areas etc.
stego-image. LSB technique as the name implies replaces the
least significant bit of the pixel with the information to be 2.1.3 Histogram Shifting Method
hidden. Since LSB is replaced there is no effect on cover image
and hence unintended user will not get the idea that some Histograms are used for graphical representation of image. It
message is hidden behind the image [3].However a little represents the pixel value and density at a particular pixel. It
change in level of intensity of original and modified pixel, but plots the pixel for each part of the image. A histogram is useful
it cannot be detected visually. to identify pixel distribution, density of colors and tonal
The following example explain how the letter A can be distribution. A histogram provides the highest and lowest pixel
hidden into the three pixels i.e. eight bytes of an 24-bit image. values in graph. Histogram shifting is the technique which is
used to modify or to extract a certain group of pixels from a
image [11]. In histogram the highest value is called maxima
Pixels: (00100111 11101011 11001010) and the lowest value is called minima. When the pixel value is
(00100111 11011000 10101001) modified for embedding process it should not cross the minima
(11001000 00110111 11011001 ) and maxima limit. There are several algorithm which supports
histogram functionality in order to manipulate the image. The
A: 010100111 number of the pixels constituting the peak in the histogram of a
cover image is equal to the hiding capacity because a single
Result: (00100110 11101011 11001010) peak in a cover image is used [5].
(00100111 11011000 10101000) Several histogram shifting techniques are enhanced by
(11001001 00110111 11011001 ) dividing the cover image into blocks to generate a respective
peak for each block which provides more hiding capacity into
The main advantage of LSB method is easy to implement and the multiple blocks.
high message payload and there is less chance of degradation
of quality of original image. The disadvantages are that the 2.2 Transformation Domain Technique
information can be easily extracted or destroyed by simple
attacks and it is less robust, vulnerable to image manipulation. Transformation domain methods hides message in the
significant areas of the cover image which makes them more
2.1.2 Pixel Value Differencing (PVD) robust against various image processing operations like
compression, cropping and enhancement. There are many
In PVD method, gray scale image is used as a cover image with transformation domain method exists. The basic approach used
a long bit-stream as the secret data [4].It was originally for hiding information is to transform the cover image, tweak
proposed to hide secret information into 256 gray valued the coefficients and then insert the transformation.
images. The method is based on the fact that human eyes can Transformation domain techniques are broadly classified into
easily observe small changes in the smooth areas but they following:
cannot observe relatively larger changes at the edge areas in the
images. PVD uses the difference between the pixel and its 2.2.1 Discrete Fourier Transformation (DFT) Technique
neighbor to determine the number of embedded bits. The larger
the difference amount is, the more secret bits can be embedded In DFT all the insertion of hidden message is done in the
into the cover image. frequency domain. It is a more complex way of hiding message
It scans the image starting from the upper left corner in a into frequency domain of the image. The Discrete Fourier
zigzag manner. Then, it simply divides the cover image into Transform of spatial value f(x,y) for an image of size M N is
number of blocks where each block consists of two consecutive defined in equation for frequency domain transformation [6].
non-overlapping pixels. The difference of the two pixels in the
block is used to categorize the smoothness properties of the
cover image. A small difference value indicates that the pixels
are at smooth area whereas pixels around edge area have large
difference values. The data is embedded mostly in the edge
(1)
areas because the changes of the pixel values are more easily
noticed by human eyes. Therefore, in PVD method a range
table has been designed with n contiguous ranges Rk (Where Similarly inverse discrete fourier transform (IDFT) is used to
k=1,2,3n) where the range is between 0 to 255.The lower convert frequency component of each pixel value to the spatial
and upper bound are denoted as Ik and Uk respectively, then domain value and the equation for transformation from
Rk [ Ik ,Uk]. The width Wk and Rk is calculated by WK= Uk- frequency to spatial domain is

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 in the carrier image for DCT coefficients lower than the
threshold value [7].Pixels having DCT coefficient value below
(2) threshold are known as potential pixels. Hence to avoid the
visual distortion in image the potential pixels are used for data
When DFT is applied it converts the cover image from spatial hiding.
domain to frequency domain and each pixel in spatial domain 2.2.3 Discrete Wavelet Transformation (DWT) Technique
is transformed into two parts: real and imaginary part. The
The Discrete Wavelet Transformation Technique is the new
hidden message bits are inserted in real part of frequency
idea in the applications of the wavelets. The standard technique
domain excluding first pixel. After embedding IDFT is
of storing in the least significant bit of pixel still applies but the
performed frequency domain converted into spatial domain.
only difference is the information is stored into the wavelet
During the extraction or decoding of the message image from
coefficients, instead of changing the bits of actual pixels in the
spatial domain is transformed to frequency domain. After
image. DWT have advantage over Fourier Transformation, it
applying DFT and extraction algorithm the original source
performs local analysis and multi-resolution analysis. Wavelet
image is retrieved.
analysis can reveal signal aspects like discontinuities,
breakdown points etc. more clearly than Fourier
2.2.2 Discrete Cosine Transformation (DCT) Technique
Transformation. The DWT splits the signal into two parts- high
The DCT transforms the image from spatial to frequency and low frequency. The information about the edge component
domain and separates the image into spectral sub-bands with is in high frequency part and the low frequency part is further
respect to visual quality of the image, i.e. low, middle and high split again into high and low frequency parts. A one
frequency components as shown in fig. 2. Here FL and FH is dimensional DWT uses filter bank algorithm [12] and the
used to denote the lowest frequency components and higher information is convolved with high pass filter and low pass
frequency components respectively. FM is used as embedding filter. Human eyes are less sensitive to high frequency so high
region to provide additional resistance to lossy compression frequency components are used for steganography.
techniques, while avoiding significant modification of the cover In two dimensional applications, for each level of
image [13]. decompositions, we first perform the DWT in the vertical
direction, followed by DWT in the horizontal direction [8]. As
we can see in the fig.3, the first level of decomposition results
into four classes or sub-band: approximate band(LL1), vertical
band(LH1), horizontal band(HL1), diagonal detail band(HH1).
The approximation band consists of low frequency wavelet
coefficients which contains the significant part of the spatial
domain image. The other bands consist of high frequency
coefficients, which contain the edge details of the spatial
domain image. For each successive level of decomposition, the
approximate band of the previous level is used as the input. In
second level of decomposition, the DWT is applied on LL1
band which decomposes it into four sub-bands: LL2, LH2, HL2
and HH2.
Figure 2: DCT Regions

It is used in the JPEG compression algorithm to transform

successive 8 8 pixel blocks of the image into 64 DCT
coefficients each in frequency domain. Each DCT coefficient
F(u,v) of an 8 8 pixel block of image pixels f(x,y) is
calculated by

(3)

Where C(x)=1/ when x=0 and C(x)=1 otherwise. The

Figure 3: Three phase decomposition using DWT
following quantization operation is performed after calculating
the coefficients:
2.3 Distortion Technique

In distortion techniques the information is stored by signal

(4) distortion. These techniques require the knowledge of the
original cover image during the decoding process. The encoder
Where Q(u,v) is a 64-element quantization table. The hidden applies series of modifications to the cover image and the
message is embedded into the redundant bits, i.e. the least decoder functions to check for the various differences between
significant bits of the quantized DCT coefficients. A the original cover image and distorted cover image to recover
modification of a single DCT coefficient affects all 64 image the secret message. Using this technique, a stego object is
pixels. In DCT based techniques, the secret data is embedded
Amritpal Singh, IJECS Volume 3 Issue 7 month July, year 2014Page No.7341-7345 Page 7343
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Author Profile

Amritpal Singh received his B.Tech degree in Computer

Engineering from Punjabi University Patiala in 2012. Currently
he is pursuing M.Tech degree in Computer Science from Guru
Kashi University, Talwandi Sabo, Bathinda (Punjab). His
research interests include Image Processing and Data Mining.

Satinderjeet Singh received his B.Tech degree from

GGSCET, Talwandi Sabo and M.Tech from Punjabi University
Patiala. Currently he is working as Assistant Professor in
department of computer science at Guru Kashi University,
Talwandi Sabo.

Amritpal Singh, IJECS Volume 3 Issue 7 month July, year 2014Page No.7341-7345 Page 7345