TY  - JOUR
T1  - Image Steganography Technique Based on Extracted Chains from the Secret Key
AU - Abbas Fadhil Al-Husainy, Mohammed AU - Mohammed Uliyan, Diaa 
JO  - Journal of Engineering and Applied Sciences
VL  - 13
IS  - 11
SP  - 4235
EP  - 4244
PY  - 2018
DA  - 2001/08/19
SN  - 1816-949x
DO  - jeasci.2018.4235.4244
UR  - https://makhillpublications.co/view-article.php?doi=jeasci.2018.4235.4244
KW  - Chains of pixels
KW  -hiding capacity
KW  -image steganography
KW  -information hiding
KW  -information security
KW  -secret key
AB  - Image stegangoraphy is considered as an active research topic where secret information is embedded
in digital images while preserving their visual quality. Recently, various image steganography techniques
focused on payload capacity, robustness and imperceptibility. However, there is a state of art between of these
three metrics and keeping a balance between them is still a challenge problem. In addition, some existing
techniques failed to gain better security caused by direct embedding of secret data inside images without
encryption or random placement consideration. This issue could make image styganalysis quite easy for an
adversary. Therefore, in this study, Least Significant Bit (LSB) is used to replace the least significant bits of
image pixels with the bits of secret data. We propose a secure image steganography method based
on stego-key. Secret data is embedded randomly in LSB of the image pixels based on chain of secret keys. The
common pipeline of our method starts by dividing the image into a group of two-dimensional blocks and uses
a set of two-dimensional stego-key. Then, the secret data is hidden in the pixels of each image block, based on
the extracted chains from the stego-key. The quantitative and qualitative experimental results show that, the
proposed method can achieve a good balance between visual image quality and its security, providing a high
capacity for hiding data with relatively less time complexity. A relatively large size stego-key is also employed
in order to increase the level of security for the proposed method and makes it hard to detect by the brute force
attacks.
ER  -