A Novel Image Steganography Approach Based on Interval Type-2 Fuzzy Similarity

Image steganography is the art of hiding secret data into an image in such a way that it cannot be detected by any intruder. For steganography, image is a good carrier because it contains a higher redundancy of pixel values, making it less sensitive to the human visual system. Therefore, embedding in those pixels of the image leads to high visual quality, payload capacity and security. This paper proposes an interval type-2 fuzzy logic-based system to detect those pixels of the image which are less sensitive to human eyes. The embedding is performed on the selected pixels using the least significant bit (LSB) method. We have termed this method the interval type-2 fuzzy logic system based LSB (IT2FLS-LSB) steganographic method. The experimental simulations were performed on a collection of image datasets to show the efficacy of IT2FLS-LSB embedding. Quality index metrics such as PSNR (peak signal-to-noise ratio), UQI (universal quality index), and SSIM (structural similarity measure) are used to assure the visual quality of the stego images. We have also evaluated the high payload capacity of our proposed method.