3D Steganography by Random Shuffling of Image Contents Using Residue Model

Abstract

A combination of cryptography and steganography techniques are used to protect and conceal the existence of sensitive data. With the rapid developments of 3D imaging technology and their widespread use over the internet, a 3D image is an exemplary candidate for steganography. The proposed technique separates a 3D image into several 2D slices, and then randomly shuffles their order using a key-based mathematical formula for random sequence generation. The employed shuffling scheme is based on the modulus operation coupled with 2 secret keys. The pixel locations within each slice are shuffled using the same scheme and a different secret key to provide an additional level of security. Although it is possible to use different shuffling schemes, the same scheme is used to reduce the complexity but with different key values to increase the data security. Blowfish is the chosen encryption technique due to its proven security and efficiency. The encrypted data is then embedded in the least significant b its (LSB) of the shuffled pixels of the 2D slices. Several steganography performance evaluation metrics are incorporated including the Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) and Structural Similarity Index (SSIM). The developed scheme is compared to some of its counterparts from the literature and the results show its superior performance over the comparison methods.