Alpha-trimmed Mean Filter and XOR based Image Enhancement for Embedding Data in Image

Abstract

In the age of digital content creation and distribution, steganography, that is, hiding of secret data within another data is needed in many applications, such as in secret communication between two parties, piracy protection, etc. In image steganography, secret data is generally embedded within the image through an additional step after a mandatory image enhancement process. In this paper, we propose the idea of embedding data during the image enhancement process. This saves the additional work required to separately encode the data inside the cover image. We used the Alpha-Trimmed mean filter for image enhancement and XOR of the 6 MSBs for embedding the two bits of the bitstream in the 2 LSBs whereas the extraction is a reverse process. Our obtained quantitative and qualitative results are better than a methodology presented in a very recent paper.