TELKOMNIKA Telecommunication Computing Electronics and Control

Vol. 20, No. 6, December 2022, pp. 1317~1325

ISSN: 1693-6930, DOI: 10.12928/TELKOMNIKA.v20i6.23596  1317

A coverless image steganography based on robust image wavelet

hashing

Nadia A. Karim, Suhad A. Ali, Majid Jabbar Jawad

Department of Computer Science, College of Science for Women, University of Babylon, Hilla, Iraq

Article Info ABSTRACT

Article history: Since the concept of coverless information hiding was proposed, it has been
greatly developed due to its effectiveness of resisting the steganographic
Received Mar 17, 2022 tools. In this paper, a new coverless steganography is presented to hide the
Revised Sep 15, 2022 secret data in a more secure way and to enhance the robustness against
Accepted Sep 25, 2022 attacks. This method depends on frequency domain. The embedding process
consists of several steps. Firstly, the secret data is divided into no
overlapping segments. Secondly, a set of images is collected to find
Keywords: appropriate images to be stego images. Thirdly, to build a hash sequence for
an image, a powerful hashing algorithm is used. Fourthly, for each image
Coverless steganography hash sequence, the inverted index structure is created. Fifthly, choose the
Discrete wavelet transform image which its hash equivalent to the secret data segment. Several tests are
Information hiding done to measure the robustness of the proposed method. The results of the
Information security experiments reveal that the proposed strategy is resistant to a variety of
Steganography image processing attacks such as joint photographic experts group (JPEG)
compression, noise, low pass filtering, scaling, rotation and median and
mean filter, brightness, and sharpening.
This is an open access article under the CC BY-SA license.

Corresponding Author:
Suhad A. Ali
Department of Computer Science, College of Science for Women, University of Babylon
Hilla, Iraq
Email: [email protected]

1. INTRODUCTION
Secret communication between a sender and a receiver has become very important due to the
extensive usage of multimedia data and advancements in telecommunications such as image, audio and
video. So that Information that is sensitive or confidential cannot be accessed by third parties. Information
hiding is normally accomplished performed using two well-known methods, steganography and watermarks,
both methods directly modify the content of the media file (image, video, and audio) for copyright protection
and covert communication or identification of the sender. There are three basic objectives of covert
communication: the message cannot be seen by anybody else while it is being transmitted; it is not modified
while it is being transmitted; and the sender is who he claims to be. The science of concealing and
transferring hidden information is known as steganography [1], [2]. It is a set of techniques for concealing
information through the use of multimedia data, such as image, text, audio, video, and network [3]-[5].
Beacuse people utilization of images since they are one of the most widely used media, Image steganography
has attracted a lot of interest, steganographic communication has a significant technology in the field of
information security today [6], [7].
Image steganography is a component of data security, where images contain sensitive or secret data,
such that it is not visible and cannot be identified by the human visual system (HVS) [5]. According to the
documentation available, there are two types of steganography techniques for images: image steganography

Journal homepage: http://telkomnika.uad.ac.id

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with data embedding and coverless image steganography. In addition, there are two types of data embedding
methods: spatial domain and frequency domain [8]. Although the human visual system does not detect the
modification in the carrier image induced by data embed, the disadvantage of spatial domain approaches such
as least significant digit (LSD) [5], [9], highly undetectable stego (HUGO) [1], wavelet obtained weights
(WOW) [10], and steganographic universal distortion (S-uniward) [10] are that they are not resistant to
normal image and steganalysis attacks. As a result, frequency domain algorithms such as the discrete fourier
transform (DFT) [11], discrete wavelet transform (DWT) [12], discrete cosine transform (DCT) [13] and
integer wavelet transform (IWT) [14] have been presented that use modified coefficients for data embedding.
These methods are more resistant to image attacks, but they are more computationally complexity, and
the information that can be hidden is limited.
The coverless image steganography framework is a new field of research when compared to
previous methods of image steganography. To hide the data, no changes to the image are required. In other
words, secret information cannot be transported without a carrier, but it can be hidden by creating a carrier
image that is visually identical to the original or by establishing mapping rules between carrier image and secret
information [14]. Finding relevant images that already contain the information of the secret data is one
technique to hide a secret data in coverless image steganography. Stego images are used to communicate
sensitive information and are categorised as such. The biggest issue is locating photos that already contain
the required information [15]. The coverless image steganography strategies can resistance image steganalysis
tools and considerably increase image security since hiding critical or confidential information does not modify
the image and can resist attacks such as contrast change, brightness, noise addition, scaling [16], rotation [17],
JPEG compression [18], brightness and noise addition [19].
Several researches have been done in this domain. The first coverless image steganography method
is based on the spatial domain, where an image can be represented by 8 bits of information, and uses a
hashing algorithm to establish hash sequences equal to a binary bit stream of the secret information. For all
hash sequences, including lookup tables, an inverted index structure is created. The approch is tested against
several image attacks that are common such as JPEG, contrast, and scaling attack [20]. The bag-of-words
(BOW) concept is used for hiding text information. To hide text information in an image, visual words are
recovered to represent text information. To extract visual words from an image set, a BOW model is utilized, and a
mapping connection is established between keywords in text information and visual terms. After then, each image
is separated into many sub-images. For each sub-image, a histogram of visual words is generated, and the borders
with the greatest values in the histogram are chosen as the sub-representation of the image. The mapping relation is
used to find a group of sub-images with visual words related with text data. For secret communication, stego
images are images that include these sub-images. The proposed method has high anti-steganalysis capabilities,
robustness towards known attacks, and security, according to the experimental findings and analysis [21].
A method for coverless image steganography is proposed based on histograms of oriented gradients (HOGS)
and hashing. Previous image steganography methods normally required the use of a cover image in order for the
secret information to be invisibly inserted in it for secret communication. Though using the embedded traces left
in the cover image, steganalysis algorithms were able to sufficiently determine the existence of secret
information. To resist current steganalysis approaches, a coverless image steganography solution is provided
that uses a hashing algorithm based on HOGS. Instead of selecting a cover image for secret information
embedding, the original images with hash sequences matching the secret information are extracted direct from a
huge database and utilized as stego images for secret communication. This method offers good resistance to
existing steganalysis tools, as well as good security and robustness against several attacks such as
resampling, brightness and contrast changes, smoothing, and the inclusion of Gaussian noise [22]. A method
for coverless hiding based on partial duplicates of a specified secret image as stego images. In this approach,
each image in the database is splitting into a number of non-overlapping patches and indexing those images
to use the features collected from these patches. Each of which has one or more patches that are visually
related to the secret image. Then the searching is done for partial duplicates of the secret image in the
database to produce the stego images. In this approach, by utilizing the patches of the stego images, it can be
approximateed retrieving the secret image at the receiver side. This method offers good resistance to existing
steganalysis tools [23]. A coverless image steganography method based on image block matching and dense
convolutional network. This method sends a collection of stego images that share one or more visually blocks
with the secret image given. Hash sequence coorsponding to the secret image is generated based on DCT and
DenseNet. The high-level semantic properties of each related block are extracted using DenseNet.
DCT produces a strong hash sequence with feature sequence, direct current (DC), and location at the same time.
The DCT coefficient and supervised deep learning improve retrieval accuracy and robustness, deep learning
can determine the best carrier for real-time image hiding data requirements, and CNN’s high-level semantic
features are more efficient than low-level features. According to experimental results, this method improves
the retrieval accuracy and capacity [24].

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2. METHOD
In this section, the proposed coverless image method is explained in details. Figure 1 shows the
structure of the proposed method. The proposed method consists of two procedures, namely embedding
propcedure and extracting procedure.

Figure 1. General block diagram of proposed coverless image steganography method

2.1. Embedding procedure

This section is explaine the embedding procedure. The embedding procedure is done at the sender
side. Several activities are implemented in the embedding procedure such as building image database, hash
sequence generation, builiding the inverted index structural, finding the suitable images, and sending the
stego images.

2.1.1. Building image database

This subsection explaines the building of database images which will be used for embedding the
secret secret data. To hide secret data in coverless image steganography, one way is to find suitable images
that already contain the information. Such images are classified as stego images, which are used to
communicate sensitive data [25].

2.1.2. Hash sequence generation by robust hashing algorithm

This subsection describes the strong hashing algorithm for generating image hash sequences.
Different kind s of attack could be used to modify the stego images during communication. Rescaling,
brightness alteration, contrast improvement, joint photographic experts group (JPEG) compression, and noise
addition are just a few examples. As a result, the hashing algorithm should be resistant to the majority among
those attacks, ensuring that the image hash sequences do not modify during transmission. It means that the
secret is sent accurately and reliably, with few errors and changes. As a result, we propose a robust hashing
algorithm for production of image hash sequences. Several phases can be completed during the production of
a hash sequence using algorithm 1. The above steps are shown in the Figure 2.

2.1.3. Builiding the inverted index structural by image indexing

To use an image sequence with a binary hash (ImgHash) as the query, it will take a long time to
look for all images with hash sequences that match the query in the database if we do an extensive search. To
speed up the search, we index all of the images in the database as according their hash sequence. Then, for all
of the hash sequences, we make a query table T1, which is an inverted index structure. T1 is a lookup table
that contains entries to the greatest extent possible hash sequences of 8 bits. Each value leads to a set of the entire
image IXDs that share the same hash sequence. Assume that image A’s hash sequence is [1, 1, 1, 0, 0, 1, 1, 1] and
that its IXD is IXD(A), and that IXD(A) falls into the list pointed by the entry 1, 1, 1, 0, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1 as shown in
Figure 3.

A coverless image steganography based on robust image wavelet hashing (Nadia A. Karim)
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Algorithm 1. Hash sequence generation

Input: O_image//original image
Output: ImgHash//sequence of bits
− Step 1: applying DWT on O_image to obtain four subbands (low low pass (LL), low high pass (LH),
high low pass (HL), high high pass (HH)).
− Step 2: dividing the LL subband into 3×3 non-overlapping segment.
− Step 3: computing the average intensity of each segment to obtain 3×3 block average array (BAvg).
− Step 4: converting (BAvg) into vector (VAvg) by scanning the array row by row.
− Step 5: converting VAvg into binary by comparing every two adjacent elements to obtain binary hash
image sequence (ImgHash) with length 8 bits.

Figure 2. Hash sequence generation

The following equation is used to calculate the binary activity conversion.

ℎ𝑗 = 1; 𝑖𝑓 ℎ𝑗 > ℎ𝑗 + 1
{ 𝑤ℎ𝑒𝑟𝑒 1 < 𝑗 < 8 (1)
ℎ𝑗 = 0; 𝑜𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑟𝑤𝑖𝑠𝑒

Figure 3. Building index

2.1.4. Using the index structure to find suitable images

This subsection describes finding the appropriate image depending on the secret message. The finding
procedure is done as the following steps.
1) Transferring the secret message into a bit string that can be sent.
2) Dividing the secret message into a number of equal-length segments (8-bit).
3) Obtaining images with hash sequences those are the same with the segment to use each segment as a query.
4) These found Images that are stego images can be considered.

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2.1.5. Sending the stego images

This sub section explaines the last activity of the ebedding procedure. After finding the suitable
images which have a hash sequence equivalent to the secret message, these images are considered as stego
images. Later, the stego images are sent one by one to the receiver at the sender’s end.

2.2. Extraction procedure

This section describes extraction the secret message in the receiver side. Herein, the secret data can
be recovered without disorder if all stego images are acquired in if all of the stego images are received in
order the correct order. Once the receiver has obtained all of the images, the sender uses the same hashing
process to generate the hash sequence for each received image. To extract the secret data, the receiver
generates a new all of their hash sequences of those images according to the sequence of the received images.

3. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

This section discusses the results after implementing the proposed method. Several experimental
results are obtained after implementing the proposed methods. The performance of the proposed method is
tested in te rms of embedding and robustness.

3.1. Tests of embedding and extracting procedures

This sub section describes the embedding and extracting procedures. Let us explaine the two
procedures deeply. Suppose that we have a secret message called (computer) and sample images dataset as
shown in Figure 4.

Figure 4. Sample of image dataset

The embedding procedure is done (in the sender side) as:

1) Take the American standard code for information interchange (ASCII) code for each letter in message
and transforming the secret message into bits as shown in Figure 5 and Figure 6.

Figure 5. ASCII code for letters of computer word

Figure 6. Binary number for the letters of computer word

2) As illustrated in Figure 7, dividing the secret message into a number of segments of identical length (8 bits).

Figure 7. Segmented secret message

A coverless image steganography based on robust image wavelet hashing (Nadia A. Karim)
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3) Generating hash sequence for each image. For example, image1 has hash equal (01100011) and image2
has hash equal (01101111).
4) Each segment is used as a query; discover the images that have hash sequences that are like as the
segment. For example, the bits of letter c equal to hash of image1 and the bits of letter o equal to hash
image2. So, image1 and image2 will be stego image.
5) Sending image1 and image2 to the receiver.
The extracting procedure is done (in the receiver side) as:
1) Each incoming image’s hash set is created by the same hashing algorithm employed by the sender once
the receiver has obtained all of those images, (as described in the subsection 2.1.2). To extract the secret
data, the receiver generates a new all of their hash sequences of those images according to the ordering
of the received images. So, the result will be as shown in the Figure 8.

Figure 8. Extracted secret message (as bits)

2) As illustrated in Figure 9, dividing the recovered secret message into a number of segments of similar
length (8 bits).

Figure 9. Segmented extracted secret message

3) Transforming the bits into ASCII and transform it to letters as shown in Figure 10.

Figure 10. Extracted secret message (as letters)

3.2. Robustness measures

To measure the robustness of the proposed algorithms two measures are used these are normalized
correlation (NC) and bit error rate (BER). Normalized correlation is used to measure the resemblance among
the extracted secret information and the original ones and bit error rate is used for measuring the error rate
between the extracted secret information and the original [25]. NC is calculated:
∑𝑛 ′
𝑖=1 𝑤(𝑖)𝑤 (𝑖)
𝑁𝐶 = ∑𝑛 2 (2)
𝑖=1 𝑤(𝑖)

While BER is calculated:

∑𝑛 ′
𝑖=1 𝑤(𝑖)𝑤 (𝑖)
𝐵𝐸𝑅 = (3)
𝑛

Where 𝑤 is the original image and 𝑤’ is the extracted secret information.

All types of content damage, such as image noise, JPEG compression, rescaling, brightness change,
and contrast shift, are unavoidable during the transmission process and so on. Each stego image selected from
the database to represent the secret data segment is subject to these attacks. These variables must be able to
withstand the information collected from the image. To put it another way, the hash algorithm is resistant to
these types of attacks.

3.2.1. Robust the proposed system against JPEG compression

This sub section discusses robustness of the proposed method against JPEG compression. Each
stego image selected from the database to represent the secret data segment is subject to JPEG compression
with various quality factors. According Table 1, the proposed system gives a good robustness against JPEG
compression attack, where the value of NC and BER is of acceptable.

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Table 1. NC and BER values under JPEG compression attacks

Quality factors (Q) NC BER
10 0 1
30 0 1
40 0 1
50 0 1

3.2.2. Robustness against noise attacks

This sub section discusses robustness of the proposed method against noise attacks. In noise attack
test, a stego image is attacked with several noise attacks namely, salt and pepper, speckle and Gaussian
noises with different noise density. Table 2 shows different types of noise attack.

Table 2. NC and BER values under different density levels of noise attacks
Attack type Density of noise NC BER
Salt and pepper 0.001 0 1
0.01 0 1
0.02 0 1
0.03 0 1
Speckle noise 0.01 0 1
0.02 0 1
0.001 0 1
Gaussian noise 0.01 0 1
0.02 0 1
0.001 0 1
Poisson noise 0 1

3.2.3. Robustness against filtering attack

This sub section discusses robustness of the proposed method against filtering attack. The stego
images were filtered with a low pass filtering (gaussian filter), mean filter and a median filter with window
size different sizes of filter kernal. Table 3 illustrates NC and BER values under filtering attack.

Table 3. NC and BER values under filtering attack

Attack type BER NC
Median filter 1×1 0 1
2×2 0.0179 0.9860
3×3 0.0197 0.9860
Mean filter 1×1 0 1
2×2 0.0179 0.9860
3×3 0 1
Gaussian filter 1×1 0 1
2×2 0.0179 0.9860
3×3 0 1

3.2.4. Robustness against geometric attacks

This sub section discusses robustness of the proposed method against geometric attacks. Rotation
and resizing attacks are tests. The proposed method achieved good results in resizing and rotation attack with
different rotation degrees. Table 4 shows the results.

Table 4. NC and BER values under geometric attack

Attack type Angle BER NC
Rotation 0.180 0 1
0.270 0 1
0.360 0 1
Resize (1024×1024) 0 1

3.2.5. Robustness against brightness and sharpening attacks

This sub section discusses robustness of the proposed method against brightness and sharpening
attacks. The stego images were tested against increasing the brightness image with factor its values (10, 20).
Also, the stego images are attacked with developing the sharpening of image. Table 5 illustrates the results.

A coverless image steganography based on robust image wavelet hashing (Nadia A. Karim)
1324  ISSN: 1693-6930

Table 5. NC and BER values brightness and sharpening attack

Attack type Factor BER NC
Brightness +10 0 1
+20 0 1
Sharpen 0 1

4. CONCLUSION
In this paper, a coverless image steganography framework based on efficient image wavelet hashing
is proposed. The embedding process is done without any modification on cover image. It finds the proper
cover images as stego-images that contain information that matches to the secret data because no evidence of
change will be left in the stego images. Moreover, due to the suggested strong hashing method, our approach
can handle image processing processes such as JPEG compression, image rotation, image scaling, and noise.
As a result, the stego images that are formed are robust to signal loss. However, using our technology, only
8-bit info may be hidden in each main image. The goal of future study will be to find techniques to increase
hiding capacity without reducing steganography performance.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This work was supported by Department of Computer Science, College of Science for Women,
Babylon University, Babylon, Iraq.

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BIOGRAPHIES OF AUTHORS

Nadia A. Karim currently, Nadia is a Master student in Computer Science

Department, Science College for Women, University of Babylon, Iraq. She received the B.Sc.
degree in computer science on 2007 from Department of Computer Science, Babylon
University. His research interests include image processing, digital watermarking. She can be
contacted at email: [email protected].

Suhad A. Ali she is working as Professor in Computer Science Department,

Science College for Women, University of Babylon, Iraq. She received M.S. and Ph.D.
degrees from Department of Computer Science, Babylon University in 2002 and 2014,
respectively. Her areas of interest are digital image and video processing, pattern recognition
and information hiding. She can be contacted at email: [email protected].

Majid Jabbar Jawad he is received the B.Sc. degree in computer science on

1989 from the University of Technology-Computer Science Dept., Iraq. He received the M.Sc.
degree in Steganography on 2003 from the same university. He received the Ph.D. degree in
Digital Watermarking and GIS on 2013 from the University of Babylon, Iraq. Currently, he is
Professor in the University of Babylon. His research interests include steganography, digital
watermarking, processing of raster and vector image and applying the information hiding
techniques in GIS (Geographical Information System). He can be contacted at email:
[email protected].

A coverless image steganography based on robust image wavelet hashing (Nadia A. Karim)