Adaptive steganography based on integer wavelet transform using block standard deviation

Abstract The capacity and security of confidential message on communication channels are two important challenges in steganography. The main objective of this study is introducing a new method based on integer wavelet transform to maintain the image quality and enhance the security of the confidential message. At first a three level integer wavelet transform is taken from the cover image. Then each level of the image is decomposed into 4 sub-bands and the middle frequencies which contain the horizontal and vertical details of the image in each level are split into non-overlapping 2×2 blocks. Next, the standard deviation of each block is calculated and based on the length of the confidential message the maximum value of the standard deviation Tmax is computed and selected for embedding. The confidential message is embedded in two changing Least Significant Bits (LSB) bits so that the standard deviation of each chosen block does not fall below Tmax. Additionally to increase the security, the confidential message is encrypted using the Advance Encryption Standard (AES) algorithm. The test results show that the proposed method has been considerably improved in terms of the Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR).

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