A Novel Steganographic Approach for Secured Communication via Boustrophedon Transformation to Develop IoT-based Smart City

Steganography is a vast arena to provide security in digital media at the time of network-level transmission. This research is based on a pioneer steganographic approach introducing Image Authentication using Boustrophedon Transformation (IABT) to ensure secured communication. The research experiment is performed using ten benchmark images of 512 x 512 dimensions and the performance result of each of the images has been analyzed thoroughly. In order to implement this transformation technique to the cover images, each of the cover media is decomposed into 1 x 3 blocks. These decomposed spatial components are transformed into frequency components by implementing the Boustrophedon transformation. Confidential data in a bit stream format is embedded into each of the transformed coefficients. Furthermore, the Inverse Boustrophedon transformation is used for converting the transformed embedded coefficients back to the pixel components. This process is kept on repeating until the entire bit stream of the hidden information is inserted into the carrier media to produce a steganography image. Moreover, the performance factor of the proposed method is examined in terms of PSNR, MSE, IF, and Payload, which shows overall better performances of the IABT.