Abstract

The aim of this study is to hide two binary BMP images in a single BMP grayscale image. The widespread technique in image steganography is to hide one image (stego image) into another (cover image). The proposed novel method is to hide two binary images into one grayscale bitmap cover image. First of all, the proposed technique starts with transforming all grayscale cover image pixels into multiples of five using Five Modulus Method (FMM). Clearly, any modulus of five is either 0, 1, 2, 3, or 4. The transformed FMM cover image could be treated as a good host for carrying data. Obviously, it is known that the pixel value for the binary image is either 0 or 1. Therefore, by concatenating the two binary images, the composite results are 00, 01, 10 and 11. In fact, these concatenated values could be mapped using simple mapping that assigns a positive integer value such as 1 for 00, 2 for 01, 3 for 10 and 4 for 11. Consequently, a new matrix will be constructed that contains a number varying from 1 to 4 only. Fortunately, the four integer values are the same as the previously mentioned reminders of division by 5, hence, adding these four integers to the transformed FMM cover image. On the recipient side, a reverse process will be implemented to extract the two binary images. In terms of PSNR values, the cover image and the two extracted stego images have acceptable PSNR values, which yields that the proposed method is very efficient in information hiding.

Keywords:

Binary image, cover image, information hiding, statistical steganography, steganography, stego image,

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