A genetic algorithm based image steganography scheme with high embedding capacity and low distortion

ABSTRACT

Since the inception of mankind, information has been an important asset; therefore, many researchers have been trying to devise different techniques which can keep messages secret from unauthorized users. Imperceptibility has been another dimension that needs to be taken into consideration and visible distortion may lead to data breach. Therefore, the data-hiding domain has witnessed many improvements but most of them have considered a static key/pattern to embed the data. Nonetheless these schemes pose security but using static keys may not guarantee the best imperceptibility and security. Therefore, a genetic algorithm-based data-hiding scheme is proposed in this paper, which uses chromosomes of genetic algorithms as key. The results have been compared against imperceptibility measures, i.e. PSNR, NC and SSIM. The result shows that the proposed scheme provides a great improvement in PSNR till 46.25 (more than 2%) in the imperceptibility.

KEYWORDS:

• Data hiding
• imperceptibility
• genetic algorithm
• secret key
• image steganography
• heuristic search
• embedding
• information security

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.