Indian Journal of Science and Technology

Abstract

In image steganography, a number of data hiding schemes have been proposed and data has been hidden using them. Among these, the usage of mind-teasers and puzzles like Sudoku has also been used as schemes to hide data. In this paper, the territory of puzzle usage as data hiding scheme in image steganography is extended. A novel data hiding scheme based on Ken Ken puzzle is proposed. Though the Ken Ken puzzle is similar to the existing Sudoku technique of data hiding, the inherent difficulty involved in solving a Ken Ken puzzle is leveraged in this method and the final results after embedding data are then analyzed in terms of the visual quality of the stego-image obtained. This is done by means of certain quality metrics available to test the resulting image quality. The proposed system has been found to enhance the graphical quality of the resulting stego-image when compared to the existing system.

Keywords: Data Hiding Scheme, Data Security, Image Steganography, Puzzle-Based Steganography