A comparative study of steganography using watermarking and modifications pixels versus least significant bit

Abstract

This article presents a steganography proposal based on embedding data expressed in base 10 by directly replacing the pixel values from images red, green blue (RGB) with a novel compression technique based on watermarks. The method considers a manipulation of the object to be embedded through a data compression triple process via LZ77 and base 64, watermark from low-quality images, embedded via discrete wavelet transformation-singular value decomposition (DWT-SVD), message embedded by watermark is recovered with data loss calculated, the watermark image and lost data is compressed again using LZ77 and base 64 to generate the final message. The final message is embedded in portable network graphic (PNG) images taken from the Microsoft common objects in context (COCO), ImageNet and uncompressed color image database (UCID) datasets, through a filtering process pixel of the images, where the selected pixels expressed in base 10, and the final message data is embedded by replacing units’ position of each pixel. In experimentation results an average of 40 dB in peak signal noise to ratio (PSNR) and 0.98 in the similarity structural index metric (SSIM) evaluation were obtained, and evasion steganalysis rates of up to 93% for stego-images, the data embedded average is 3.2 bpp.