LSB Rotation and Inversion Scoring Approach to Image Steganography

The less obvious that an image has been modified, the less it will be suspected of containing a secret message or image. This paper proposes an image steganographic approach wherein the bit information of the secret message replaces the LSBs (least significant bit) of the RGB (red green blue) bytes of the cover image just like many of the LSB image steganography methods, except that the bits of the secret message undergo a series of evaluated and scored bit rotation and inversion operations prior replacement. Using MSE and PSNR as a measure of image quality, the stego image generated by this proposed approach produced lesser distortion than the existing four bits per byte replacement approach of LSB Replacement and Adaptive LSB Embedding algorithms. The proposed approach however does not offer significant improvement of robustness in terms of security.