Genetic Algorithm

c 2010 ISSN 2073-4212 Journal of Information Hiding and Multimedia Signal Processing Ubiquitous International Volume 1, Number 1, January 2010

A Secure Steganography Method based on Genetic Algorithm
Shen Wang, Bian Yang and Xiamu Niu
School of Computer Science and Technology Harbin Institute of Technology 150080, Harbin, China [e-mail]; [e-mail]; [e-mail]

Received April 2009; revised August 2009

Abstract. With the extensive application of steganography, it is challenged by steganalysis. The most notable steganalysis algorithm is the RS attack which detects the steg-message by the statistic analysis of pixel values. To ensure the security against the RS analysis, we presents a new steganography based on genetic algorithm in this paper. After embedding the secret message in LSB (least significant bit) of the cover image, the pixel values of the steg-image are modified by the genetic algorithm to keep their statistic characters. Thus, the existence of the secret message is hard to be detected by the RS analysis. Meanwhile, better visual quality can be achieved by the proposed algorithm. The experimental results demonstrate the proposed algorithm’s effectiveness in resistance to steganalysis with better visual quality. Keywords: steganography; steganalysis; genetic algorithm; RS algorithm

1. Introduction. Steganography is a branch of information hiding. It embeds the secret message in the cover media (e.g. image, audio, video, etc.) to hide the existence of the message. Steganography is often used in secrete communication. In recent years, many successful steganography methods have been proposed. Among all the methods, LSB (least significant bit) replacing method is widely used due to its simplicity and large capacity. The majority of LSB steganography algorithms embed messages in spatial domain, such as BPCS[?, ?], PVD[?, ?]. Some others, such as Jsteg[?, ?], F5[?], Outguess[?, ?], embed messages in DCT frequency

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