A secured image steganography method based on ballot transform and genetic algorithm

S. K. Sabbir Hossain, Souradeep Mukhopadhyay, Biswarup Ray, Sudipta Kumar Ghosal, Ram Sarkar

Abstract: Rapid advances in digital technology have facilitated us to transfer a huge amount of electronic files over the internet. But in the presence of malicious attackers, the security, as well as the integrity of such important files, becomes of utmost importance. Steganography, an art of hiding the data, ensures the security of these files over the internet, and this method has been used for a long. In this paper, our purpose is two-fold. First, the Ballot transform (BaT) produces an integer polynomial sequence in coefficient form for each non-overlapping m-pixel groups (m = 2 or 3) of the cover image. Second, the Genetic Algorithm (GA) is applied to generate a k-digit password using a method called Index Value Mapping (IVM) which decides positions of the transformed coefficients where the bits of the secret data can be embedded. The key idea of using GA here is to produce an optimal output in terms of stego image quality instead of using an exhaustive search considering all combinations of k number of bits. Experimental results show that the proposed method not only offers acceptable Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) values with considerable payload but also provides two-way security of the data being transmitted over the digital medium.