WebP-based high capacity image steganography

Abstract

Nowadays, Cryptography is widely used in data protection, however, one major drawback of the scheme is that it draws attention to an attacker, which results in perceptibility of those data. In order to handle this kind of problem, Steganography can be used instead. It can be operated in two domains: spatial and frequency domains. Usually, spatial domain-based methods usually yield higher payload than transform domain-based methods. On the other hand, transform domain-based methods usually work well with image compression. In a recent survey, many existing transform domain-based methods are designed for a JPEG-based image. Even though the JPEG-based image is widely used, the JPEG compression performance is not good enough in cloud era for which tons of images are transferred over the internet. Thus, the newer image format such as WebP is presented to provide better compression performance. In this research, the new scheme for image steganography based on WebP is presented. The proposed method archived good performance in terms of data capacity, image quality and file size compared to the existing JPEG-based method. Moreover, because WebP supports alpha-channel. Thus, image steganography with alpha-channel is also introduced.