AES-Secured Bit-Cycling Steganography in Sliced 3D Images

This paper proposes 2 double-layer message security schemes in 3D cover images. For each of the schemes, the first layer involves the use of cryptography, namely the advanced encryption standard (AES). While for the second layer, both schemes employ a variant of LSB 3D image steganography. In this second layer of security, each of the schemes allows the bit embedding to take place according to a mathematical sequence. The first scheme makes use of an arithmetic sequence, while the second scheme makes use of a geometric sequence. Various performance evaluation metrics are utilized in this work, to check for the quality of steganography in the stego 3D images used. Those include computations of the means squared error (MSE), peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), structural similarity index measure (SSIM), mean absolute error (MAE) as well as the entropy.