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Steganography application for efficient documentation of Palembang cultural

objects

Conference Paper · January 2016

DOI: 10.1109/ICCCI.2016.7479975

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Steganography Application for Efficient Documentation of
Palembang Cultural Objects

Shinta Puspasari
Department of Computer Science
Universitas Indo Global Mandiri
Palembang, Indonesia
shinta@uigm.ac.id

Abstract—This paper discusses the application of
steganography method in the digital documentation system of
Palembang cultural objects. The application aims to document
the digital image of cultural object and its textual description
contain information about the history of it. Differences in the
data format makes unefficient seperated data storage for
information sharing. This study proposes Least Significant Bit
method for embedding textual description into image of
coresponding cultural objects. The embedded text can be
updated but may not be removed due to the aims of application.
A prototype is developed by implementing the proposed method
and then evaluated using sample data of images and text format
of cultural object. The experimental results shows its
effectiveness obtaining stego images that have been inserted by its
object textual description. Stego image gives an alternative way
to store and disseminate the information related to Palembang
cultural objects. Hidden text on stego image act as annotation of
image provide efficiency for sharing and documentation of
cultural objects.
Keywords— Steganography; LSB; Palembang Culture
I. INTRODUCTION
Palembang became the center of the capital of the kingdom of
Srivijaya and the oldest city in Indonesia. This fact makes
Palembang rich of cultural diversity with acculturation of
various tribes and nations such as, Asia, Europe, Arab, and
Malay [1]. The existence of cultural heritage and Palembang
cultural objects shows mix of cultures between nations, for
example, Songket craft is a mix of Malay and Chinese
cultures. The architecture of several historical buildings show
mix between Javanese and Arabic cultures, for example
Building of Palembang Great Mosque [2]. Cultural objects
existed since the era of Srivijaya whereabouts are now
beginning to become extinct, and only a few are still available
and stored in the museum under the aegis of the Department of
Culture and Tourism of Palembang Government. There are
things that no longer exist, it remains painting and its textual
description or even the story of the object only. It is fear if the
objects that exist today will be damaged or destroyed due to
aging and its care is not optimal because lack of fund for
maintenance. An alternative method for preserving cultural
property is by documenting implementing digital
documentation system that high resistancy and low-cost
maintenance for storing, backing up, and updating data.
Information about Palembang culture can be accessed easily,
quickly, and distributed globally through Internet. The images
of cultural objects are stored in digital image format, such as
JPEG or PNG, mean while object description contains
information about the history and function of these objects are
stored in text format such as TXT or DOC. This condition
makes the files stored separately and unefficient when sending
data. Problems also arise when sending image unfollowed by
the data description so that the documentation is incomplete.
An approach needs to be proposed to overcome the problem
by combining these two informations seperated in different
format into one. The method can be applied is steganography,
the method for insertion of information on media such as text,
audio, image, and video.
In this study, the information description of cultural
objects stored in text format will be embeded in its digital
image and produce a new data information in a digital image
format. So that when image is sent or downloaded
automatically the description of the object will also be sent
and downloaded then be extracted back in a text format.
Steganography can be done for a variety of media i.e text,
image, and audio [3] with a variety of methods. For image
media, some effective methods have been applied, such as
Least Significant Bits (LSB), masking and filtering,
transformation. LSB method is widely used in data insertion
due to the method applied in the spatial domain and is easy to
apply [3,4,5].
This study apply LSB for insertion of Palembang cultural
objects description information in text format into the image
of cultural objects in the digital format. Two separated data
will be reform into one using LSB produces stego image
which can be extracted resulting information about the object
in text format. Prototype of the application is developed in
web based system development environment so it can be
accessed globally in future. Testing as part of system
development is done for evaluation. Some sample images and
its object description of Palembang cultural objects i.e cultural
heritage and art objects are taken. The method in this study
makes the documentation of cultural objects Palembang
become more efficient and effective, especially for the
conservation and cultural resistance of Palembang as the great
city that rich of culture since Srivijaya Kingdom era.
 The rest of the paper is organized as follows: Section 2 data. Examples of data that may be embeded include text
gives the information of Steganography and Least Significant messages encoded with ASCII values of characters, audio
Bits Method. Section 3 discusses the detail steps of proposed messages, images, or even videos.
method in this study performing LSB for data hiding on
cultural object image and the development of the application
system. Section 4 describes the experimental results of the
study and finally concluded at the end of the paper.

II. STEGANOGRAPHY
The word steganography is of Greek origin and means
"covered, or hidden writing" Steganography is defined by
Markus Kahn [2] as follows, "Steganography is the art and
science of communicating in a way which hides the existence
of the communication. The goal of Steganography is to hide
messages inside other harmless messages in a way that does
not allow any enemy to even detect that there is a second
message present". Steganography and cryptography are Fig. 1 Steganography framework
closely related. Cryptography scrambles messages so they can
not be understood. Steganography, on the other hand, will hide
the message so there is no knowledge of the existence of
messages. R G B
Hiding process needs two objects to cover, message object (00100111 11101001 11001000)
and carrier object. Message is the secret data that should be
hidden and carrier is the material that takes the message in it (a)
[4,5]. Steganography takes carrier object as input and produce
R G B
stego object as its output (Fig.1). Carrier object refers to the
(00100110 1101001 11001001)
object used as the carrier to embed messages into object.
Different objects format can be embeded for example images,
(b)
audio, and video as well as file structures. Stego-object refers
Fig. 2 Bits of a RGB Pixel (a) before (b) after LSB insertion
to the object, which is carrying a hidden message [6,7,8,9].
A. Least Significant Bits
III. EMBEDDING STRATEGIES
A method for embedding information in carrier image is
Least Significant Bits (LSB). The simplest steganography A. System Design
techniques embed the bits of the message directly into least
Insertion of cultural objects textual description data into
significant bit plane of the cover image in a deterministic
digital image is designed as one of the features on the web
sequence. Modulating the least significant bit does not result
based documentation system of Palembang cultural objects.
in human-perceptible difference because the amplitude of the
This feature becomes part of the subsystem of image
change is small [9]. To hide a message inside an image, a
management illustrated in usecase model as the following
proper cover image is needed. Because this method uses bits
Fig.3,
of each pixel in the image, it is necessary to use a lossless
compression format, otherwise The hidden information will System

get lost in the transformations of a lossy compression

algorithm. When using a 24-bit Color image, a bit of each of
Delete
the red, green and blue color components can be used, so a
total of 3 bits can be stored in each pixel. A simple example
with a 24-bit image 1 pixel illustrated as the following Fig. 2a <<include>>
Image Management Add
then insert 001 on it becomes as Fig. 2b. LSB of pixels were Embedding
visited in random or in certain areas of image. The more bits
<<extend>>
are changed the more visible its embedded message. It will
Update <<extend>>
reduce image quality. Extracting

The data must be serializable, so that it can be embeded bit <<extend>>

user
by bit into the cover. The data must be no larger than the
cover, or the cover would not be able to contain all of the
data’s information. For an image, the cover and the data could
have the same number of pixels, but the cover will have
significantly more color information per pixel than the hidden Fig.3 Image management usecase model
 Designed images management usecase model provide
access for user to be able to add, delete, and update the
cultural object image that is inputed by user. Add usecase
contains data embedding and extracting usecase functionality.
When adding data at once user will process insertion of textual
description into an image of cultural object.
Embedding functionality feature will apply LSB to embed
cultural object textual description into digital image format.
Furthermore, to see the effectiveness of the data insertion,
users can perform the extraction process through Extracting
features. Extracting features will extract the embedded text on
the image (stego image) choosen by user. Users also can
embed or extract the stego image while accessing update
usecase. The image and text descriptions that are inputed and
stored separately in different formats then will be formulized
into one form by manipulating the LSB of each pixel in the
image. The insertion method of cultural objects textual
description into the digital image as illustrated in the following
Fig. 4.
LSB Algorithm embed the textual description of the
coresponding cultural object in input image and produce stego
image. It contains information that can be extract but does not
remove the text from stego image. Stego image will be saved
and ready to be store or shared by user. The proposed method
in this study does not implement cryptography to enkrip the
text because the hidden information is not a secret message. It
acts as annotation of image that shareable. Once the
description is embedded then the inserted informatioan can be
updated by accessing update activity but it may not be
removed.
Fig.4 Activity diagram of Embedding process
B. Implementation
Based on the proposed system design, a prototype web-
based system in the PHP programming language development
environment is build. Snippets of program code for data input
activity, the insertion process, displaying, storing, and
extracting data are shown in Fig.5. Data update algorithm and
full implementation code are not shown in this Fig.5. PHP is
chosen as the language for application development because
the program will be merged with the web-based
documentation system of Palembang cultural objects in future
so it can be accessed globally. Efficient delivery of data
become an issue to be addressed by the data insertion method
proposed in this study. Stego image as the output of the
system can be extracted and provide textual description of the
object. The process can be extended to update data which will
update the inserted description. Remove feature is not
included because the embedded information on stego image
may not be removed due to the aim of this study is to store
cultural object digital image in one form and place with its
description.
Part of the implementation source code in Fig.5 consists of
32 lines, some of them only for declarations propose as well as
additional comments. The main code is located start from line
4 to next following lines.
Lines 4 and 5, input carrier image and its object textual
description. Line 13, the process of insertion by calling the
library steganography.php. Line 21-24, display the image data
and descriptions before inserted. Line 29 -32, stego image
displays the extraction results.
The codes are executed using a browser and a number of
sample are tested in term of evaluation of proposed method.
Fig.5 Implementation source code
 III. EXPERIMENTAL RESULT TABLE II
TEXT LENGTH VARIATION TESTING RESULT
The experiment begins with the collection of sample
data contain digital images of Palembang cultural objects Text Stego image
consisting of historical building and artistic object. Imagery
acquired with different devices, namely digital camera and Memory % Memory %
(bytes) (txt/img) (bytes) (stego/carrier)
scanner. The images used as data sample are stored in JPG and
750750 1131 218119 329
GIF format with the size of the memory < 1 Mbytes. The data
acquisition process is performed offline separately from the 8536 13 196421 296
application developed in this study. Results of the 150150 226 218119 329
implementation program code like illustrated in Fig.5 is run
1075536 1620 218171 329
using browser Crome 45.0.2454.101 to conduct testing results
of the LSB algorithm implementation. Once executed and
TABLE III
tested using digital image data of Palembang cultural objects EMBEDDED MESSAGE UPDATE RESULT
and its following description in text .txt format obtained the
experimental results as summarized in Table I. Previous Data Updated Data
Based on the data in Table I, it is known that LSB method Filename Image Text Image Text
(bytes) (bytes) (bytes) (bytes)
applied to image by inserting text messages effectively
perform data insertion time < 2 seconds in average. The trial ampera.png 87163 1550 87663 2423
results also shows that the stego image has an average size of ledeng.jpg 138360 1441 138244 291
two times (200%) the size of the carrier image. This condition
Smb2.jpg 190688 276 1162 191220
causes the image to be larger than previous so it can be sure
data are hide inside. But data security is not the main focus in Bkb.jpg 192027 858 192024 291
this study because the information is indeed to be deployed
right thereby increasing public knowledge about particular
Palembang cultural objects. Table I also shows that there are The second column in Table II represents the percentage ratio
differences in size of stego small image to the same carrier of the memory size of embedded text and the carrier image.
image but a different embedded text size, i.e the image of No. The fourth column represents the percentage ratio of stegano
9 and 10. Further testing is performed to analyze this image memory size and carrier image. It shows that after the
phenomenon. The tests carried out on the image of bkb.jpg text size > 100 times the size of the image then the stego
with a memory size of 66394 bytes. Testing results for this image becomes constant with the size of the memory
case are presented in Table II. Updating embedded text maximum to 329% of the size of the image carrier. This is
message is also tested and the result presented in Table III because the text size was too big so no longer able to be
shows its effectiveness. All embedded message in tested inserted in the LSB pixel image. While visually, there is no
images are updated as same as extracted text. difference between the image carrier and stego image. For
example, it can be seen for image bkb.jpg (Fig.7 and Fig.8),
TABLE I
EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS SUMMARY

No. Filename Size (bytes) Runtime

Carrier Text Stego (s)
Image Message image
1 cdwelan.jpg 74751 1752 165795 0.85918
2 angsoko.jpg 80947 2273 175350 0.84961
3 koci.jpg 56803 3069 119762 0.95018
4 lwngkidul.jpg 76849 922 161447 1.48448
5 bgskuning.jpg 97910 2234 267943 1.43449
6 ampera. png 111457 3781 89002 0.59375
7 ledeng jpg 52024 3140 142233 1.37866
8 smb2.jpg 73914 15015 200457 1.74894
9 bkb.jpg 66394 750750 218119 3.91932
10 bkb.jpg 663q94 8536 196421 1.53515 Fig.7 Bkb.jpg as a sample of carrier image
 [7] Petitcolas, Fabien A.P., “Information Hiding: Techniques for
Steganography and Digital Watermarking”, 2000.
[8] Lokeswara Reddy Dr. A. Subramanyam Dr.P. Chenna Reddy,
”Implementation of LSB Steganography and its Evaluation for Various
File Formats”, Int. J. Advanced Networking and Applications Volume:
02, Issue: 05, Pages: 868-872 , 2011.
[9] J. Fridrich and M. Goljan, "Digital image steganography using stochastic
modulation", SPIE Symposium on Electronic Imaging, San Jose, CA,
2003.

Fig.8 Stego Image of bkb.jpg

IV. CONCLUSIONS
This study discusses the application of LSB
steganography method for insertion of data description of
Palembang cultural objects in text format into a digital image.
A system is design to implement LSB method for inserting
textual description of the object for purpose of efficient
documentation in data storing and sharing. It formulize two
sperated data in different format, image and text, into one. The
proposed method produces a stego image which can be
regarded as an annotated image contains information about
object on image. The embedded information in images can be
extracted and updated so that no lost information during
storing, sharing, or sending process.
The experimental results shows stego image successfully
established in the average processing time < 2 seconds and
accurately extracted back without any lost data unless the text
size exceeds the carrier image > 100%. Base on this study, the
data can be stored unseperated and unefficient in one format
and it makes a digital documentation system development of
Palembang cultural objects become more effective with the
completeness of the data is assured by the system.

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