Ramses: a Visual Steganographic System

Steganography is the art of “secret communication”. Its goal is to transmit a message (information) hidden inside another visible message. The typical visible message used in many steganographic systems is a digital image and the embedded message is usually hidden by working in the Fourier domain. In this paper we present Ramses, a novel approach to the steganography based on the Puzzle Image Mosaic (PIM) technique ([DGP05]) which uses the metaphor of the hieroglyphic writing to hide the message in the image. The message is first coded by a sequence of small irregular images and then merged inside another image together with many other small images. We prove that the Kerckhoff's principle required by a steganographic technique is satisfied and experimental results show how it is very difficult to detect the hidden message.