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Extended exploiting modification direction based steganography using hashed-weightage Array

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Abstract

Steganography is the method of hiding secret message information in various cover media like text, image, audio, video and others without raising suspicion to intruders about the existence of any such information. Exploiting Modification Direction (EMD) based image steganography is a steganographic technique designed by Zhang and Wang in 2006 that yields minute distortion of the cover image. In this paper, an Extended EMD based steganography using Hashed-Weightage Array abbreviated as EEMDHW has been proposed. 2KN-ary numbers are embedded in every K pixels of the cover image, where N denotes the number of bits embedded in each pixel. Thus, the payload is purely variable in this technique. Embedding is performed using dynamic weightage array. This array is made pseudo random by applying eliminative hashing technique on the message pixels. Experimental results show that the technique is superior to other state-of-the-art techniques in terms of embedding capacity (payload) and has reduced quality distortion of cover image. Steganalysis using RS attack shows that the embedding done by the proposed method cannot be detected upto 3 bits per pixel (bpp) embedding rate.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science & Engineering, Jadavpur University, Kolkata, 700032, India

    Shaswata Saha, Anuran Chakraborty, Agneet Chatterjee, Souvik Dhargupta & Ram Sarkar

  2. Department of Computer Science & Technology, Nalhati Government Polytechnic, Birbhum, Pin, Nalhati, 731243, India

    Sudipta Kr Ghosal

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  1. Shaswata Saha
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  2. Anuran Chakraborty
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  3. Agneet Chatterjee
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  4. Souvik Dhargupta
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  6. Ram Sarkar
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Correspondence to Sudipta Kr Ghosal.

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Saha, S., Chakraborty, A., Chatterjee, A. et al. Extended exploiting modification direction based steganography using hashed-weightage Array. Multimed Tools Appl 79, 20973–20993 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-020-08951-1

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