LSB Rotation and Inversion Scoring Approach to Image Steganography

Abstract— The less obvious that an image has been modified, the less it will be suspected of containing a secret message or image. This paper proposes an image steganographic approach wherein the bit information of the secret message replaces the LSBs (least significant bit) of the RGB (red green blue) bytes of the cover image just like many of the LSB image steganography methods, except that the bits of the secret message undergo a series of evaluated and scored bit rotation and inversion operations prior replacement. Using MSE and PSNR as a measure of image quality, the stego image generated by this proposed approach produced lesser distortion than the existing four bits per byte replacement approach of LSB Replacement and Adaptive LSB Embedding algorithms. The proposed approach however does not offer significant improvement of robustness in terms of security.

Published in: 2018 15th International Joint Conference on Computer Science and Software Engineering (JCSSE)

Date and Location: July 11-13, 2018 at Nakhon Pathom, Thailand

DOI: 10.1109/JCSSE.2018.8457333

Ryan A. Subong Computer Engineering Department Western Institute of Technology Iloilo City, Philippines Rai_Yan@yahoo.com Arnel C. Fajardo School of Engineering and IT Manuel L. Quezon University Quezon City, Philippines acfajardo2011@gmail.com Yoon Joong Kim Department of Computer Engineering Hanbat National University Daejeon, Republic of Korea yjkim@hanbat.ac.kr