A novel reversible steganography method using dynamic key generation for medical images

Abstract

Nowadays security of information became an important issue. So it is mandatory to preserve the security of data that need to be transmitted in telemedicine application for proper and cost effective diagnosis. Steganography plays an important role in telemedicine application by providing confidentiality and integrity. This paper proposes a steganography technique which hides patient information inside medical images using a key dynamically generated by graph3 coloring and pixel count of cover image. Steganography is done along with cryptography by encrypting the patient information using RSA algorithm to strengthen the level of security. This proposed method maintains reversibility that the original medical images can be losslessly restored after the extraction of data from stego medical image. Experimental results show that this novel method is more secure as compared to other information hiding methods against various parameters such as computational complexity in key generation by unauthorized person and quality measure of reversed image in terms of Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR) and Mean Square Error (MSE).