LSB-2 Steganography with Brotli Compression and base64 Encoding for Improving Data Embedding Capacity

Abstract

Steganography functions as a technique for embedding messages or data in various forms of media, such as images, audio, video, or text, with the aim of avoiding detection by unauthorized parties. Steganography techniques can be used as a solution to hide and protect data. In this research, steganography will be carried out using images as the transmission object. This research was conducted to offer a modification of the Least Significant Bit (LSB) steganography technique using the LSB-2 method with Brotli compression and base64 encoding. Modification and use of Brotli compression and base64 coding aims to increase the message capacity that can be embedded in a transmission object while maintaining the quality of the transmission object. Experiments using small data and big data. The experimental results will be presented in tabular form by comparing the original image with the steganographically processed image using metrics such as Mean Square Error (MSE), Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR), and Structural Similarity Index (SSIM) as a comparison. The experiments carried out resulted in an increase in image capacity by reducing capacity usage with an average of 47.13% for small data and an average of 71.34%. The big data experiment resulted in an increase in the PSNR value of around 3.49%, accompanied by a decrease in the average MSE value of 33.85%, and a constant SSIM value of 0.9999, thus proving that the proposed method was successful in increasing image capacity and improving stego-image quality. when embedding big data.