Implementation and efficiency of steganographic techniques in bitmapped images and embedded data survivability against lossy compression schemes

• Main Authors: Currie, Daniel L., Campbell, Hannelore
• Other Authors: Irvine, Cynthia E.
• Language: en_US
• Published: Monterey, California. Naval Postgraduate School 2012
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10945/8501

Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited === The term steganography is descriptive of techniques used to covertly communicate by embedding a secret message within an overt message. Such techniques can be used to hide data within digital images with little or no visible change in the perceived appearance of the image and can be exploited to covertly export sensitive information. This thesis explores the data capacity of bitmapped image files and the feasibility of devising a coding technique which can protect embedded data from the deleterious effects of lossy compression. In its simplest form, steganography in images is accomplished by replacing the least significant bits of the pixel bytes with the data to be embedded. Since images are frequently compressed for storage or transmission, it is desirable that a steganographic technique include some form of redundancy coding to counter the errors caused by lossy compression algorithms. Specifically, the Joint Photographic Expert Group (JPEGi) compression algorithm, while producing only a small amount of visual distortion, introduces a relatively large number of errors in the bitmap data. These errors will effectively garble any noncoded steganographically embedded data