Steganography techniques and implementation - for hiding information in digital images

• Main Author: Lu, Xiyun.
• Other Authors: Ting See Ho
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2013
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering::Electrical and electronic engineering::Computer hardware, software and systems
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/51050
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

A continuous boost in the amount of information exchanged and stored in a variety of digital media has been brought by the increasing use of the Internet brings about. This has resulted in certain unusual consequences involving both helpful and harmful usage of data. Steganography is a beautiful art of concealing the fact that when communication is happening, it conceals data in other forms of data. Because of their prevalent usage on the Internet, digital images and pictures are the most well-known, despite the various available file formats. For hiding secret information in images, you could find quite a number of steganographic methods which are either simple or complicated and also with respective advantages and disadvantages. Different steganography techniques are used for different programs. For instance, some programs may require a greater capacity for secret data to be hidden, while others require complete imperceptibility of the secret data. This paper attempts to elaborate on the technique of LSB substitution steganography by specifying the criteria of a good steganographic techniques after providing a summary of the uses and techniques of image steganography. The threshold for human eye to distinguish between the stegoimage and the cover image would also be discussed later in this report, for cover image of different sizes and RGB/grayscale property. This is to ensure that the programme I designed provides no suspicion to human visual system. Possible improvement of the programme would be suggested and the LSB substitution technique would be review in the final part of the report. Full MATLAB codes for GUI and other related algorithm provided in the appendix would be available for public use for reference and further improvement.