Adaptive Steganography-based Optical Color Image Cryptosystems

Cheng-Hung Chuang
Dept. of Computer Science and Information Engineering Asia University Taichung County 41354, Taiwan chchuang@asia.edu.tw
AbstractIn this paper, an optical cryptosystem with adaptive steganography is proposed for color image encryption and decryption. The optical cryptosystem employs a double random phase encoding algorithm to encrypt and decrypt color images. The color image is first separated into three channels: red, green, and blue. Each channel is encrypted by two random phase masks generated from session keys. For higher security, an asymmetric method is applied to cipher these session keys. The ciphered data produced by the asymmetric method is then embedded into the encrypted color image by a contentdependent and low distortion data embedding technique. The key delivery is accomplished by hiding ciphered data into the encrypted color image with a specific hiding sequence generated by the zero-LSB sorting technique. Experimental results show that the proposed adaptive steganography-based cryptosystem has a good performance when it is applied to color images.

Guo-Shiang Lin
Dept. of Computer Science and Information Engineering Da-Yeh University Changhua County 51591, Taiwan khlin@mail.dyu.edu.tw domain methods. The earliest method, which is simple and has high embedding capacity, embedded data into least significant bits (LSBs) of image pixels (i.e. spatial domain). Contrarily, in the transform domain, e.g., discrete cosine transform (DCT), Fourier transform, or wavelets, transformed coefficients of cover signals can be manipulated to hide messages. For high speed application, image encryption methods based on optical systems have been developed. Many optical image encryption algorithms have been proposed for transmission security [6-11]. The double random phase encoding [6] is a famous and widely used algorithm which employs two random phase masks in the input plane and the Fourier plane to encrypt images into stationary white noise. In [7], an optical image cryptosystem based on the double random phase encryption and a public-key type of data embedded technique is proposed. In [8], the optical encryption is performed using the fractional Fourier transform. In [9], a new image cryptosystem with an adaptive steganographic method is proposed to improve the security and visual quality. However, the input image is limited to grayscale in those cryptosystems. In [10], the encryption method using wavelength multiplexing and lensless Fresnel transform hologram is proposed for color image application. In [11], the optical color image encryption scheme is performed in the fractional Fourier transform domain. In this paper, we propose an optical color image cryptosystem based on the double random phase encryption and the adaptive steganographic method. The color image is first separated into three channels: red, green, and blue. Each channel is encrypted by two random phase masks generated from the session keys. The session keys are encrypted by the asymmetric encryption method, e.g. the RSA (Rivest-ShamirAdleman) algorithm [12]. This ciphered data is embedded into the LSBs of the encrypted channel data, in which a zero-LSB sorting technique is applied to find the hiding sequence. Simulations and experiments regarding the proposed adaptive steganography in comparison with the conventional method [7] are performed. Experimental results show that the proposed

I.

INTRODUCTION

With the fast development of communication technology, it is convenient to acquire multimedia data. Unfortunately, the problem of illegal data access occurred frequently and popularly. Hence, it is important to protect the content and the authorized use of multimedia data against the attackers. Data encryption is a strategy to make the data unreadable, invisible or incomprehensible during transmission by scrambling the content of data [1]. In an image cryptosystem, it uses some reliable encryption algorithms or secret keys to transform or encrypt secret images into ciphered images. Only the authorized users can decrypt secret images from the ciphered images. The ciphered images are meaningless and nonrecognizable for any unauthorized users who grab them without knowing the decryption algorithms or the secret keys. Dissimilarly, steganographic techniques refer to methods of embedding secret data into cover data in such a way that people can not discern the existence of the hidden data. The image steganographic methods (or called virtual image cryptosystems) [2-5] are proposed to hide the secret images into readable but non-critical cover images. They are designed to reduce the notice of illegal users. Common methods for data hiding can be categorized into spatial and transform

978-1-4244-3828-0/09/$25.00 2009 IEEE

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color image cryptosystem has a good performance in secure data embedding, hiding capacity, and visual quality. II. THE PROPOSED METHOD

In the double random phase encoding [6], an image I is multiplied by a random phase mask Ps in the input plane and transformed to Fourier domain. It is multiplied by another random phase mask Pf and converted to the spatial domain for obtaining the encrypted image Ie. In the decoding step, the encrypted image is transformed to the Fourier plane, multiplied by the conjugate of mask Pf, converted to spatial field, and multiplied by the conjugate of mask Ps to obtain its decrypted image Id. The equations are defined as follows.
I e = F 1 F {I exp(i 2Ps )}exp(i 2Pf )

Assume that there are N bits in the ciphered data B. Since the values in the encrypted image Ie are complex numbers, the where F denotes the Fourier transformation, F indicates its real and imaginary parts can be used to embed data. The inverse function, and Ps*, Pf* are the conjugate masks of Ps, Pf. complex number form can be written as below. For a color image, it is first separated into three channels: (3) I e = + i red, green, and blue. The three channels are coded by the double random phase algorithm, i.e. multiplied by masks Psr, where and are the real and imaginary parts. In this paper, Psg, Psb, and Pfr, Pfg, Pfb. Session keys are used to generate the real part stands for the hidden site. The detailed these phase masks and then ciphered by the asymmetric encryption algorithm for higher security. The ciphered data is embedding and decoding procedures are described as follows.
e

I d = F 1

{ } {F {I }exp(i2P )}exp(i2P )
* f * s

(1)
(2)

The ciphered data is embedded into LSBs of the quantized encrypted image. Hence, the quantization and embedding steps will cause the loss in image quality. The important issue is how to select the hidden regions or positions that result in low distortion of the decrypted image. It is a simple way to hide the data in fixed positions of the encrypted image. Nevertheless, due to the different image content, the fixed positions are not always suitable for hiding data. To improve the visual quality of the decrypted image and safely convey the session keys, a low distortion, adaptive, and contentdependent data embedding technique is applied to hide the secret data. In our strategy, the positions with smaller absolute values are preferable since they have smaller energy and quantization step size. To keep the embedding and decoding sequences invariant, the LSBs are set to zero and a sorting technique is employed.

-1

embedded into the encrypted image for the delivery of session keys. The receiver, who owns the private keys of the encryption algorithm, can decipher session keys using the hidden data extracted from the encrypted image. Then the session keys are used to decrypt and reconstruct the color image. Figure 1 shows the schema of the proposed optical color image cryptosystem.

A. Embedding Procedure 1) The values of real part in Ie are sorted in ascending order with their absolute values. The set of the first N+2 numbers except the maximum and the minimum is chosen and defined as = {1 , 2 ,..., N } , where i i +1 , i , i +1 . Note that the maximum and minimum in the first N+2 numbers are not used to quantize and hide data, since the quantization step size is computed from them. 2) The set is quantized to be Q = QL ( ) = { q1 , q 2 ,..., qN } , where QL ( ) denotes a quantizer with L levels.

3) All LSBs of Q are modified to zero to obtain the zeroLSB set QZ = { qz1 , qz 2 ,..., qzN } . The elements in QZ are sorted in ascending order with their absolute values to obtain QZS = { qzs , qzs ,..., qzs } , where qzs qzs , qzs , qzs QZS .
1 2 N
i i +1
i i +1

(a)

4) The sequence S = {s1 , s 2 ,..., s N } , where si {1,2,..., N } and i = 1,2,..., N , generated by the set QZS , is used to be the data hiding index. That is, the ciphered data B is successively embedded into the LSBs of the set Q with sequence S, namely QS = { qs , qs ,..., qs } , where qs Q .
1 2 N
i

5) The embedding rule is defined as

E QS = QS + sgn( B mod( QS ,2))
(b)
Figure 1. Schema of the proposed color image cryptosystem. (a) Encryption, (b) Decryption (X: multiplication, E and E-1: the embedding and decoding functions).
e e e hidden data is E QS = { qs1 , qs 2 ,..., qs N } .

(4)

where sgn() {1,0,1} is the signum function and the set with

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E 1 E 6) Finally, the set E QS is de-quantized to get S = QL ( QS )

1 () denotes the de-quantizer = { se1 , se2 ,..., seN } , where QL

with L levels.

B. Decoding procedure 1) This step is the same as the first step in embedding e e procedure. The set is defined as E = { 1e , 2 ,..., N } , where

ie ie+1 , ie , ie+1 E . The sequence in E is different

from that in .
E 2) The set E is quantized with L levels to be E Q = QL =

Figure 2 shows the original, encrypted, and decrypted color images of No. 2 and 37, which exhibit the minimal and maximal PSNR values (L=8) among the 100 cases. The PSNR values are 33.44, 10.65, 44.07, and 21.98 dB in Fig. 2(c), 2(d), 2(g), and 2(h), respectively. Figure 3 shows the PSNR curves of the 100 decrypted color images with L=8 (red) and L=16 (blue), where the solid and dotted lines are the results using the adaptive and the conventional methods, respectively. In Fig. 3, the mean PSNR values of these four curves are 44.59, 38.56, 22.04, and 16.08 dB from top to bottom, respectively.

( )

{ , ,..., } .
e q1 e q2 e qN

3) All LSBs of E Q are set to zero to obtain the zero-LSB set

e e e E E QZ = { qz1 , qz 2 ,..., qzN } . The elements in QZ are sorted in ascending order with their absolute values to obtain e e e e e e e , where qzs , qzs . E qzs , qzs E QZS = { qzs , qzs ,..., qzs } QZS
1 2 N
i i +1
i i +1

(a)

(b)

4) Now, the set

E QZS

is equal to the set QZS with the same

sequence, S = {s1 , s 2 ,..., s N } . The hidden data is extracted

e e e from the LSBs of the set E QS = { qs1 , qs 2 ,..., qs N } , i.e. e b = 0, if mod( qs ,2) = 0 B = {b1 , b2 ,..., bN } = i e bi = 1, if mod( qs ,2) = 1
i i

(5)

III.

EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS (c) (d)

In our experiment, one hundred 24-bit 512512-pixel color images (collected from [13-15]) are tested and the PSNR is applied to evaluate the visual quality of the decrypted color images. The conventional embedding algorithm [7], where the ciphered data is embedded into the central square area in the encrypted image, and the adaptive steganographic method are performed for comparison. For an identical evaluation, the size of hidden data is fixed and set to 196608 bits. Table I shows the maximal, minimal, and mean PSNR values of the 100 decrypted color images with different quantization levels, i.e. L = 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, and 256. It is obvious that the PSNR values increase about 22 dB in the results of the adaptive method.
TABLE I. QUALITY EVALUATION OF THE 100 DECRYPTED COLOR IMAGES WITH DIFFERENT QUANTIZATION LEVELS. Quantization Level 8 16 32 64 128 256 PSNR (dB)
Adaptive method Max. Min. Mean Conventional method [7] Max. Min. Mean

(e)

(f)

44.07 50.13 56.11 62.17 68.12 74.21

33.44 39.41 45.46 51.49 57.50 63.53

38.56 44.59 50.60 56.62 62.64 68.67

21.98 27.57 33.93 39.54 45.78 51.21

10.65 17.07 23.03 28.85 34.90 41.00

16.08 22.04 28.01 34.06 40.07 46.08

(g)

(h)

Figure 2. (a)(e) The original color images of No. 2 and 37, (b)(f) the encrypted color images, (c)(g) the decrypted color images by the adaptive method (PSNR=33.44 and 44.07 dB), and (d)(h) the decrypted color images by the conventional one (PSNR=10.65 and 21.98 dB).

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To evaluate the data hiding capacity versus the visual quality of the decrypted color images, the 100 encrypted color images are embedded with different size of data ranged from 108 to 750,000 bits. The quantization level is set to 8. The average PSNR value of the 100 decrypted color images is calculated for the visual quality. Figure 4 shows the curve of the data hiding capacity versus the visual quality, where the solid and dotted lines are the results using adaptive and conventional methods, respectively. When the hidden data size is more than 30,000 bits, the PSNR value is less than 25 dB using the conventional method. In the results of the adaptive method, it is about 63 dB when the data size is 30,000 bits. If the PSNR is set to 25 dB in the results of the adaptive method, the hidden data size can be reached to about 514,780 bits that is 17 times the data size of the conventional one. It is demonstrated that the adaptive steganography-based optical color image cryptosystem has a better performance than the traditional one.

random phase encoding algorithm, the asymmetric encryption method, and the adaptive steganographic data embedding technique are applied in the proposed color image cryptosystem. The color images are encrypted by the double random phase encoding algorithm. The session keys are ciphered by the asymmetric encryption method. The ciphered data of session keys is embedded into the encrypted color image by the adaptive steganographic data hiding method. Thus, the session key delivery is achieved by using the adaptive steganography technique. In comparison with the traditional technique, a high data embedding capacity and visual quality of the color image cryptosystem are performed. It is verified that the proposed cryptosystem provides data hiding characteristics of content-dependence, low distortion, and security. Moreover, the proposed adaptive steganographic technique can be applied to any field that data hiding is needed. ACKNOWLEDGMENT This research was supported by the National Science Council, Taiwan, under the grant of NSC97-2221-E-468-006. REFERENCES
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[3] [4]

[5] Figure 3. PSNR curves of the 100 decrypted color images with quantization levels L=8 (red) and L=16 (blue). The solid and dotted lines are the results using the adaptive and the conventional methods, respectively.

[6]

[7]

[8]

[9]

[10]

[11]

Figure 4. Curves of the data hiding capacity versus the visual quality of the decrypted color images. The solid and dotted lines are the results of the adaptive and the conventional methods, respectively.

[12] [13] [14] [15]

IV.

CONCLUSION

In this paper, the optical color image cryptosystem based on the adaptive steganography is presented. The double

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