A secure image steganography based on burrows wheeler transform and dynamic bit embedding

Abstract

In modern public communication networks, digital data is massively transmitted through the internet with a high risk of data piracy. Steganography is a technique used to transmit data without arousing suspicion of secret data existence.  In this paper, a color image steganography technique is proposed in spatial domain. The cover image is segmented into non-overlapping blocks which are scattered among image size window using Burrows Wheeler transform before embedding. Secret data is embedded in each block according to its sequence in the Burrows Wheeler transform output. The hiding method is an operation of an exclusive-or between a virtual bit which is generated from the most significant bit and the least significant bits of the cover pixel. Results of the algorithm are analyzed according to its degradation of the output image and embedding capacity. The results are also compared with other existing methods.