Color-based microscopic image steganography for telemedicine applications using pixel value differencing algorithm

Abstract

There are some ethics in the medical world to keep patient information confidential on every result of medical observations and analysis. Therefore, steganography technique is an alternative to conceal sensitive text information on a medical image in the telemedicine system process. Research on steganography using Simple LSB-Substitution and other algorithm has been available but in this study, the implementation of steganography was designed to hide text in color medical images before being sent through the telemedicine system. Sensitive text is hidden in medical images using the Pixel Value Differencing (PVD) algorithm. The main purpose of using this algorithm is to maintain the peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR) and mean square error (MSE) of the steganography image result. As a result, the PSNR value can be maintained at the 57,98dB for 10KB hidden text, and lower MSE at 0.05 for high-density object microscopic image.