One of the evaluation methods for image steganography is preserving cover image quality and algorithm imperceptibility. Placing hidden information should be done in such a way that there is minimal change in quality between the cover image and the coded image (stego ima More
One of the evaluation methods for image steganography is preserving cover image quality and algorithm imperceptibility. Placing hidden information should be done in such a way that there is minimal change in quality between the cover image and the coded image (stego image). The quality of the stego image is mainly influenced by the replacement method and the amount of hidden information or the replacement capacity. This can be treated as an optimization problem and a quality function can be considered for optimization. The variables of this function are the mappings applied to the cover image and the hidden information and location of the information. In the proposed method, by genetic algorithm and using the two concepts of targeted search and aimless search, the appropriate location and state for placement in the least significant bits of the cover image are identified. In this method, hidden information can be extracted completely and without error. This feature is important for management systems and cloud networks that use steganography to store information. Finally, the proposed method is tested and the results are compared with other methods in this field. The proposed method, in addition to maintaining the stego image quality, which is optimized based on PSNR, has also shown good performance in examining histogram and NIQE statistical criteria.
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