earticle

영어

Steganography refers to techniques that hide information inside innocuous looking objects known as “Cover Objects” such that its very existence remains concealed to any unintended recipient. Images are pervasive in day to day applications and have high redundancy in representation. Thus, they are appealing contenders to be used as cover objects. There are a large number of image steganography techniques proposed till date but negligible research has been done on the development of a standard quality evaluation model for judging their performance. Existence of such a model is important for fueling the development of superior techniques and also paves the way for the improvement of the existing ones. However, the common quality parameters often considered for performance evaluation of an image steganography technique are insufficient for overall quantitative evaluation. This paper proposes a rating scale based quality evaluation model for image steganography algorithms that utilizes both quantitative parameters and observation heuristics. Different image steganography techniques have been evaluated using proposed model and quantitative performance scores for each of the techniques have been derived. The scores have been observed to be in accordance with actual literature and the system is simple, efficient and flexible.