Reversible steganographic method based on interpolation and genetic algorithm

Abstract

Recently, Information security is amongst the major challenges in the world of information communication. Hence the necessity of Steganography which is one of the solutions to fulfill this need; it is the technique of hiding a secret information into a seemingly harmless digital file to ensure successful extraction by the intended receiver. In this paper, a new reversible steganographic method based on the genetic algorithms (GA) combined with the interpolation by linear box-splines on the three directional mesh is proposed. The GA helps to choose among the interpolated pixels the suitable location where to dissimulate the secret information. The population that the GA is operating on is paths that indicate which pixel shall be used for the dissimulation. From a generation to the next one, the selected path provides a lesser Mean Square Error, which helps to obtain a good imperceptibility. As for the capacity, the interpolation technique used in this work provides a large space to conceal data. These hypotheses were corroborated by intensive experimental results that were accomplished on a wide set of test images. We obtained a good trade-off between imperceptibility and capacity.