An Enhanced Robust and Protected Image Steganographic System

Abstract

This chapter deals with two main aspects; the first one is concerned with introducing an improved robust and secure image steganography system. The original algorithm presented by Mali et al. gives adequate results in terms of robustness; however, the algorithm cannot be considered reliable, as some data is lost. In order to overcome the problem of the lost data due to the misidentified blocks, an embedding map was proposed to specify the location of the blocks that can be used for embedding a secret message. Such a technique, the embedding map, is very important if one needs to start the extracting phase correctly and accurately. Besides, any loss in the embedding map will in turn lead to data loss. Consequently, the embedding map will be hidden using SURF and DWT to assure robustness and to increase the level of security of the proposed system. The secret data can be embedded using the original algorithm (DCT -based) proposed by Mali et al. More so, the experimental results show the ability of the new algorithm, namely IRSS , to overcome the problem of losing data even with JPEG compression or Gaussian noise.