Title: Robustness realisation in image steganography using frequency domain-based transforms for e-voting

Authors: M. Vivek; K.V. Anusuya

Addresses: PSG College of Technology, Coimbatore, Tamilnadu, India ' PSG College of Technology, Coimbatore, Tamilnadu, India

Abstract: E-voting, a sensitive application intensifies the need for highly secured data transmission from the voter's device to the exclusive storage for achieving confidentiality and integrity of voted data. The security breach on voting information leads to an indecisive political affair. Hence, the robust steganography technique is preferred to embed the acute text file of voter data in a cover image. Here, two steganography models employed with frequency domain-based discrete cosine transform (DCT) and discrete wavelet transform (DWT) fused with linear congruential generators (LCG) are proposed. The bits of the covert message are embedded into the assigned blocks of the cover image as per the pseudo-random number sequence generated (PRNG) by LCG. The robustness of the models is evaluated from the values of PSNR and RMSE under Gaussian, median, speckle, Poisson, salt, and pepper noise environments. It is revealed that the DWT-based technique yields superior performance under limited payloads.

Keywords: e-voting; discrete cosine transform; DCT; discrete wavelet transform; DWT; linear congruential generators; LCG; peak signal to noise ratio; PSNR; robustness; root mean squared error; RMSE; steganography.

DOI: 10.1504/EG.2024.136986

Electronic Government, an International Journal, 2024 Vol.20 No.2, pp.223 - 239

Received: 08 Dec 2021
Accepted: 12 Jun 2022
Published online: 01 Mar 2024 *

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