Proceedings of International Conference on Applied Innovation in IT  ·  2026/04/22  ·  Vol. 14  ·  Issue 2  ·  pp. 1–11
Theoretical Foundations of a New Approach to Container Selection when Organizing a Steganographic Communication Channel
Ivan Bobok, Svitlana Hryhorenko, Alla Коbozieva and Oksana Vasylenko
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Abstract
The most promising direction of information protection today is steganography, the main goal of which is to hide the very fact of the existence of information exchange. The choice of container plays a key role in ensuring certain properties of the steganographic system, but the problem of container selection currently has no satisfactory solution. The aim of the work is to develop the theoretical foundations of a new approach to a priori selection of a container from a given set of digital candidate images, common in the sense of independence from the steganographic algorithm used, to improve the visual quality of the steganographic message. The aim is achieved by means of a well-founded definition of the container selection criterion; choosing a quantitative indicator of the visual quality of the steganographic message. The most significant results of the work are the theoretical justification of the feasibility of using the normalized separation of the maximum singular number of the image matrix as a selection criterion. The significance of the obtained theoretical results lies in the possibility of their effective practical use for selecting a container from a given set of candidates, which is demonstrated in the work by means of a computational experiment. It is shown that using the selected image as a container allows obtaining the best/close to the best structural similarity index for the corresponding steganographic message (the maximum deviation from the best value within the experiment was 0.3%), regardless of the steganographic algorithm used and the format of the candidate images. Using subjective ranking, it was established that the visual quality of steganographic messages obtained based on selected containers was improved compared to random ones.
Keywords
Container Selection Perception Reliability Structural Similarity Index Measure (SSIM) Singular Value Decomposition.
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