Spatial-Based 2D Image Steganography using Josephus-Traversing Concentric Midpoint Circle Algorithm

Steganography is the science of hiding secret messages within media like images and further studies have been conducted to enhance existing techniques to secure communication between parties. There are concluded studies that focus on the enhancement of individual steganography techniques like LSB, MSB, and PVD but still embed secret data in sequential order. In this kind of approach, attackers may first opt to analyze pixels in this common approach and can easily extract the hidden message. The proposed method uses Midpoint Circle Algorithm to determine the intermediate pixel locations to be used for embedding and to arrange them based on the number of skips through the concept of Josephus Problem to add confusion. The proposed method still uses the traditional LSB, MSB, and PVD approaches but image quality and security are ensured. In testing the proposed method, PSNR, MSE, and SSIM were determined, as well as the histogram and pixel differences. As a result, using these metrics, the proposed method is on par with the traditional method in terms of the quality. But since it has a new approach in embedding secret data, security is its main advantage. The recommendations for the improvement of this study include the code optimization of midpoint circle algorithm to analyze images regardless of their sizes, and for better quality and security, the acceptance of colored images and enhancement of the said spatial-based steganography techniques applied to this proposed method.