A Novel M-Log Chaos Method for Enhanced Security Blended with Pristine d-Hybrid LSB Approach for Reducing Image Degradation Hinged on Huffman Compression of English Text for Payload Improvement

Abstract

Pretext & Motivations: Spatial domain-based image steganography is the stowing away technique in which disguised data is hidden directly inside the pixel intensities of an unclassified image. After a systematic literature review based on the PRISMA framework, it was realized that no single disquisition has covered all three acreages together i.e., improved payload capacity, augmented security, and reduced image degradation. Chaotic method was restricted to be used as fodder for searching techniques or diffusion of disguised data within the CI. In the proffered approach, a novel use of chaotic function as bombs that can be used to guard the real message is explored. Proffered Method: The proffered method can be divided into two parts: Insertion of secret text (Huffman compression + novel M-Log chaos bombs embedding + d-Hybrid 3-LSB) and extracting the recondite message out (diffusing chaos bombs + decompressing the message). Results: Efficient developments were achieved by the proffered method in all three acreages i.e., Payload improvement of 40%, mean PSNR of 45.8981 and mean SSIM of 0.9931, and 32% image degradation reduction. Conclusion and Future Scope: The proposed method used Huffman compression to clinch the up-scaled payload. Chaotic function values, along with a modulus function, were used to feed into a novel bomb generator equation [ ], which fosters locus for stashing chaos bombs in any image. When triggered by the attacker, these bombs caused permanent marring of recondite data, denying the intruder access to disguised information. As an additional element, image degradation caused was reduced by the pristine d-hybrid method. For future studies, the use of multidimensional chaotic functions and different searching techniques for identifying ideal locations for stashing chaos bombs can be explored.