Securing X-Ray Images Into Cover Images Using Hybrid EBS Steganography With Five-Layer Cryptography

Electronic Medical Images (EMI) have grown with the increase in population. EMI are used for medical diagnosis for medical emergencies hence, they should be correct and clear for accurate diagnosis. In general, EMI are of varying sizes and dimensions. The aim is to enhance the security and privacy of EMI with reduced computational time while dealing with a larger and varying-sized data set. Reducing computational time will make the method suitable for real-time applications (RTA). Hence, a data set of 5856 secret X-ray images all varying in dimensions, total sized up to 1.16 GB, are applied with a hybrid of steganography and cryptography. Here, one X-Ray image is taken at a time then hidden into a single cover image using Edge-based steganography and then encrypted using five layers of cryptography. Various performance evaluation tests such as Structural Similarity Index Metrics (SSIM) achieved a value close to 1 which is the preferred value, Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) is 82.51967 dB which is good, Mean Square Error (MSE) is 5.6E-09 which is close to zero indicating no addition of noise in the retrieved X-ray images, the Correlation (R) is 1. Therefore, the extracted image is the same as the original X-ray images, while remaining tests such as RMSE, Entropy, KLD, BER, SNR, CV, MAPE, PRD, etc. achieved good results. The computational time is measured by the Encryption Time (ET) is 0.37 seconds while the Decryption Time (DT) is 3.9275 sec. Thus, it can be concluded that a hybrid method (HM) could be implemented for RTA.