Enhanced security of EMI using an edge-based steganography with four-layered cryptography

Abstract

Security and privacy of EMI images while being transmitted over an insecure medium or when stored on third-party storage. In this paper, an enhancement of the EBS steganography with four layers of cryptography has been implemented to ensure the secrecy and privacy of a large and diverse data set of X-ray images available in JPEG format. The major objective of this research is to secure a large and diverse data set of EMI into a cover image without degrading the EMI quality as these can be used for future medical referencing. A data set of 5856 varying dimensioned and sizes X-ray images is hidden one at a time around the Edge of the normalized cover image Lena using edge-based steganography. The algorithms with various performance evaluation tests such as Computational Time is 0.135217 seconds for creating one stego-crypto-image, Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR) is 74.55838892 dB, Mean Square Error (MSE) is 3.50075E-08, Bit Error Rate (BER) is 2.25493E-05, SSIM is 0.46291047, etc. The results obtained showed less computational time, while quality tests such as BER, and SSIM ensure that the image extracted is the same as the original hence better performance and reduction in computational time.