A Comparative Analysis of Image Steganography Techniques in Spatial and Transform Domains

Image steganography is the study and practice of concealing information within images with the purpose of deceiving the viewer as if there is no information hidden within the images. Transferring the embedded information to the destination securely without being detected is considered the biggest challenge. In this paper, a comparative analysis of image steganography in both the spatial and a transform domains, particularly the Least Significant Bit (LSB) and Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) was conducted. Two experiments were carried out to evaluate the performance of LSB and DCT based steganography techniques with respect to the quality of the generated stego images and their robustness against some known attacks. ALASKA2 and BOSSBase datasets were utilized in this study. The results show that the DCT based stenography technique outperforms the LSB counterpart as it generates stego images with higher quality and higher (Peak to Signal Ratio) PSNR values. It was also shown that DCT steganography is more robust against steganalysis.