Author(s)

Sahib Khan, Muhammad Nawaz Khan, Somia Iqbal, Syed Yaqoob Shah, Nasir Ahmad

.
Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Engineering & Technology, Peshawar, Pakistan.

Secure exchange of information is the basic need of modern digital world of e-communication which is achieved either by encrypting information or by hiding information in other information called cover media. Concealing information requires a well designed technique of Stegnography. This work presents a technique, variable tone variable bits (VTVB) Stegnography, to hide information in a cover image. The VTVB Stegnography hides variable data in discrete cosine transform (DCT) coefficients of the cover image. VTVB Stegnography provides variable data hiding capacity and variable distortion. Additional large data hiding this technique provide extra security due to the large key size making VTVB Stegnography technique much more immune to steganalysis. The hiding makes the existence of information imperceptible for steganalysis and the key of keeping a secret makes the recovering of information difficult for an intruder. The key size is depending on cover image and numbers of bits of discrete cosine transform (DCT) coefficients used for information embedding. This is a very flexible technique and can be used for low payload applications, e.g. watermarking to high payload applications, e.g. network Stegnography.

Information Security; Image Processing; Stegnography; Steganalysis; Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT)

S. Khan, M. Khan, S. Iqbal, S. Shah and N. Ahmad, "Implementation of Variable Tone Variable Bits Gray-Scale Image Stegnography Using Discrete Cosine Transform," Journal of Signal and Information Processing, Vol. 4 No. 4, 2013, pp. 343-350. doi: 10.4236/jsip.2013.44043.