Hybrid Encoding Schemes in Image Steganography Combined with Scrambling for Safeguarding Legal Asset Documents

Abstract

Objective: The main objective of the study is to provide security to legal asset documents by including the details of ownership of the asset. Methods: This paper aims to improve security of legal asset documents using hybrid encoding schemes in Image Steganography combined with Image Scrambling. The proposed work uses images were gathered from various online sources grouped into a dataset of 40 images along with their 40 text files respectively. The techniques that were applied in the research are pre-processing for the noise removal, Steganography to embed data into image and Scrambling to introduce blur to the image. Finally, the objective metrics like Mean-Square Error (MSE), Peak Signal - Noise Ratio (PSNR) and Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) values were calculated from them and compared with the acceptable values of the respective metrics. Findings: In the existing study, Steganography and Scrambling has been used separately for data and image security but in the proposed technique, Steganography has been applied with the land ownership data being hidden in the document image and the image being scrambled using different masks. The objective metrics gave the results such as the MSE value ranged between 0.0 and 10.0; the SNR value ranged between 14 dB to 80 dB; the PSNR value lies between 27 dB to 100 dB. The outcome of these values was mostly within the acceptable value range for all the measures here. Novelty: The proposed output dataset contains land asset documents that have details of ownership embedded in itself. Also, the hybrid encoding schemes of both the steganography and scrambling used here gives us data and image security together as proved in the outcome. Keywords: Image Steganography, Scrambling, Text Hiding, Legal Documents, Data Security