Enhancing Secret Data Protection Via Steganography in Images with Bits Transformation

Protecting data transmission, which plays a capital importance for data confidentiality, has recently been recognized as significant attention.Several research works using the data hiding paradigm have tried to apply steganography in digital images to protect the secret bits of confidential data against unwanted access throughout the public network commonly used.Nevertheless, the existing steganography algorithm faces a common challenge of a significant distortion of the image transmitted through the public network after concealing the secret bits in its pixels.To address this steganography problem in digital images, this article presents a new algorithm to optimize embeddable pixels used to yield a quality stego image with fewer distortions.The proposed method transforms the secret bits into a simplified format by changing the base system and mathematical sorting to reduce the magnitude, making the payload size significantly minimal.The proposed method is experimentally tested using 256 256 grayscale images from the Signal and Image Processing Institute (SIPI) database as cover images and random bits generated from Lorem Ipsum text as secret data.The method's performance is compared to the recent Difference Expansion (DE) method, showing superior results with an average Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) of 85 dB and a Structural Similarity Index Measure (SSIM) of 0.99, indicating higher stego image quality.