CSIS: Compressed sensing-based enhanced-embedding capacity image steganography scheme

Abstract

Image steganography plays a vital role in securing secret data by embedding it in the cover images. Usually, these images are communicated in a compressed format. Existing techniques achieve this but have low embedding capacity. Hence, the goal here is to enhance the embedding capacity while preserving the visual quality of the stego-image. It is also intended to ensure that the scheme is resistant to steganalysis attacks. This paper proposes a compressed sensing image steganography (CSIS) scheme to achieve these goals. In CSIS, the cover image is sparsified block-wise, linear measurements are obtained, and then permissible measurements are selected. Next, the secret data is encrypted, and 2 bits of this encrypted data are embedded into each permissible measurement. For the reconstruction of the stego-image, ADMM and LASSO are used for the resultant optimization problem. Experiments are performed on several standard greyscale images and a colour image. Higher embedding capacity, 1.53 times more compared to the most recent scheme, is achieved. An average of 37.92 dB PSNR value, and average values close to 1 for both the mean SSIM index and the NCC coefficients are obtained, which is considered good. These metrics show that CSIS substantially outperforms existing similar steganography schemes. © 2021 The Authors. IET Image Processing published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of The Institution of Engineering and Technology