A Hybrid Steganography System based on LSB Matching and Replacement

Abstract: This paper proposes a hybrid steganographic ap-proach using the least significant bit (LSB) technique for grayscale images. The proposed approach uses both LSB match-ing (LSB-M) and LSB replacement to hide the secret data in images. Using hybrid LSB techniques increase the level of security. Thus, attackers cannot easily, if not impossible, extract the secret data. The proposed approach stores two bits in a pixel. The embedding rate can reach up to 1.6 bit per pixel. The proposed approach is evaluated and subjected to various kinds of image processing attacks. The performance of the proposed algorithm is compared with two other relevant techniques; pixel-value differencing (PVD) and Complexity Based LSB-M (CBL). Experimental results indicate that the proposed algorithm out-performs PVD in terms of imperceptibility. Also, it significantly outperforms CBL in two main features; higher embedding rate (ER), and more robust to most common image processing attacks such as median filtering, histogram equalization, and rotation.

Hazem Hiary, Khair Eddin Sabri, Mohammed S. Mohammed and Ahlam Al-Dhamari. “A Hybrid Steganography System based on LSB Matching and Replacement”. International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications (IJACSA) 7.9 (2016). http://dx.doi.org/10.14569/IJACSA.2016.070951

@article{Hiary2016,
title = {A Hybrid Steganography System based on LSB Matching and Replacement},
journal = {International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications},
doi = {10.14569/IJACSA.2016.070951},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.14569/IJACSA.2016.070951},
year = {2016},
publisher = {The Science and Information Organization},
volume = {7},
number = {9},
author = {Hazem Hiary and Khair Eddin Sabri and Mohammed S. Mohammed and Ahlam Al-Dhamari}
}