Performance of Logarithmic Magnitude of Centre-Element-Based Steganography over OFDM constituted Wireless Communication Channel

Hiding crucial information is today's utmost concern and transmitting through wired or wireless medium is another attentive subject. Quality secret hiding requires robustness and better perceptual visuals of the host image. Also, a secret embedding mechanism should offer higher immunity to noises. The work proposes a robust and efficient patch-based secured steganography (P-BSS) mechanism. The stego image is transmitted over an orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) based Wireless Communication system governed by 802.11 WLAN. The stenography framework uses center element (CE) information to embed secret bits in its 3x3 neighborhood. The strategy is based on the magnitude and natural logarithm of the center element. The statistical operation on the center element defines the position in the neighborhood from where the embedding process should be initiated. The secret binary information is then hidden using the LSB embedding approach. The stego image when transmitted over a Binary phase shift keying (BPSK) modulated OFDM wireless communication system, the stego image was immune to Additive White Gaussian Noise (AWGN) above 10 dB. The proposed logarithmic magnitude of the center-element-based steganography (LM-CEB-S) framework maintains a proper balance between imperceptibility and security.