Steganography Based on Pixel Intensity Value Decomposition
This work addresses steganography for secure data hiding, but it is incremental as it builds on existing decomposition techniques.
The paper tackled the problem of balancing payload capacity and stego quality in steganography by proposing a new pixel intensity value decomposition scheme that ensures the sum of bit-planes does not exceed 255, resulting in better compromise and improved stego quality in higher bit-planes compared to existing methods.
This paper focuses on steganography based on pixel intensity value decomposition. A number of existing schemes such as binary, Fibonacci, Prime, Natural, Lucas, and Catalan-Fibonacci (CF) are evaluated in terms of payload capacity and stego quality. A new technique based on a specific representation is used to decompose pixel intensity values into 16 (virtual) bit-planes suitable for embedding purposes. The new decomposition scheme has a desirable property whereby the sum of all bit-planes does not exceed the maximum pixel intensity value, i.e. 255. Experimental results demonstrate that the new decomposition scheme offers a better compromise between payload capacity and stego quality than other existing decomposition schemes used for embedding messages. However, embedding in the 6th bit-plane onwards, the proposed scheme offers better stego quality. In general, the new decomposition technique has less effect in terms of quality on pixel value when compared to most existing pixel intensity value decomposition techniques when embedding messages in higher bit-planes.