Open Access

ARTICLE

Elevating Image Steganography: A Fusion of MSB Matching and LSB Substitution for Enhanced Concealment Capabilities

by Muhammad Zaman Ali¹, Omer Riaz¹, Hafiz Muhammad Hasnain², Waqas Sharif², Tenvir Ali², Gyu Sang Choi^3,*

1 Department of Information Technology, The Islamia University of Bahawalpur, Bahawalpur, 63100, Pakistan
2 Department of Computer Science, The Islamia University of Bahawalpur, Bahawalpur, 63100, Pakistan
3 School of Computer Science and Engineering, Yeungnam University, Gyeongbuk, 38541, Korea

* Corresponding Author: Gyu Sang Choi. Email:

(This article belongs to the Special Issue: Multimedia Encryption and Information Security)

Computers, Materials & Continua 2024, 79(2), 2923-2943. https://doi.org/10.32604/cmc.2024.049139

Received 28 December 2023; Accepted 03 April 2024; Issue published 15 May 2024

Abstract

In today’s rapidly evolving landscape of communication technologies, ensuring the secure delivery of sensitive data has become an essential priority. To overcome these difficulties, different steganography and data encryption methods have been proposed by researchers to secure communications. Most of the proposed steganography techniques achieve higher embedding capacities without compromising visual imperceptibility using LSB substitution. In this work, we have an approach that utilizes a combination of Most Significant Bit (MSB) matching and Least Significant Bit (LSB) substitution. The proposed algorithm divides confidential messages into pairs of bits and connects them with the MSBs of individual pixels using pair matching, enabling the storage of 6 bits in one pixel by modifying a maximum of three bits. The proposed technique is evaluated using embedding capacity and Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) score, we compared our work with the Zakariya scheme the results showed a significant increase in data concealment capacity. The achieved results of our work show that our algorithm demonstrates an improvement in hiding capacity from 11% to 22% for different data samples while maintaining a minimum Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) of 37 dB. These findings highlight the effectiveness and trustworthiness of the proposed algorithm in securing the communication process and maintaining visual integrity.

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Keywords

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