A modified DWT-based image steganography technique

The main challenges of image steganography are imperceptibility of the cover image and no recoverability of the secret data. To deal with these challenges, a modified digital image steganography technique based on Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) is proposed. In proposed approach, two new concepts are being proposed to minimize the distortion in the cover image. The first one i.e. secret key computation concept is proposed to make it more robust and resistive towards steganalysis. The second one, known as blocking concept, is introduced to ensure least variation in the cover image. The proposed approach is tested over ten different cover images and two secret images. Its performance is compared with the six well-known steganography techniques. The experimental results reveal that the proposed approach performs better than the existing techniques in terms of imperceptibility, security and quality measures. The six image processing attacks are also applied on the stego-image to test the robustness of the proposed approach. The effects of compression, rotation, and application of different wavelets have also been investigated on the proposed approach. The results demonstrate the robustness of the proposed approach under different image processing attacks. Both stego-image and extracted secret images possess better visual quality.

[1]  S. Hemalatha,et al.  A Secure And High Capacity Image Steganography Technique , 2013, ArXiv.

[2]  George Stephanides,et al.  A novel technique for image steganography based on a high payload method and edge detection , 2012, Expert Syst. Appl..

[3]  S. Katzenbeisser,et al.  A survey of steganographic techniques , .

[4]  Jessica J. Fridrich,et al.  Digital image steganography using universal distortion , 2013, IH&MMSec '13.

[5]  Ainuddin Wahid Abdul Wahab,et al.  A data hiding scheme using parity-bit pixel value differencing and improved rightmost digit replacement , 2017, Signal Process. Image Commun..

[6]  Christian Cachin,et al.  An information-theoretic model for steganography , 1998, Inf. Comput..

[7]  Jessica J. Fridrich,et al.  Designing steganographic distortion using directional filters , 2012, 2012 IEEE International Workshop on Information Forensics and Security (WIFS).

[8]  Odai M.Al-Shatanawi,et al.  A New Image Steganography Algorithm Based on MLSB Method with Random Pixels Selection , 2015 .

[9]  Jessica J. Fridrich,et al.  Steganalysis Features for Content-Adaptive JPEG Steganography , 2016, IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security.

[10]  A. M. E. Moghaddam,et al.  A New Approach for Image Hiding Based on Contourlet Transform , 2012 .

[11]  Shahrokh Ghaemmaghami,et al.  LSB++: An improvement to LSB+ steganography , 2011, TENCON 2011 - 2011 IEEE Region 10 Conference.

[12]  Tomás Pevný,et al.  "Break Our Steganographic System": The Ins and Outs of Organizing BOSS , 2011, Information Hiding.

[13]  S. Hemalatha,et al.  Wavelet Transform Based Steganography Technique to Hide Audio Signals in Image , 2015 .

[14]  Jessica J. Fridrich,et al.  Universal distortion function for steganography in an arbitrary domain , 2014, EURASIP Journal on Information Security.

[15]  Della Baby,et al.  A Novel DWT Based Image Securing Method Using Steganography , 2015 .

[16]  Lee-Ming Cheng,et al.  Hiding data in images by simple LSB substitution , 2004, Pattern Recognit..

[17]  Dinesh Kumar,et al.  Digital Image Steganography Based on Combination of DCT and DWT , 2010, ICT.

[18]  Jessica J. Fridrich,et al.  Content-Adaptive Steganography by Minimizing Statistical Detectability , 2016, IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security.

[19]  Nameer N. El-Emam,et al.  New steganography algorithm to conceal a large amount of secret message using hybrid adaptive neural networks with modified adaptive genetic algorithm , 2013, J. Syst. Softw..

[20]  Fawzi M. Al-Naima,et al.  A modified high capacity image steganography technique based on wavelet transform , 2010, Int. Arab J. Inf. Technol..

[21]  Yun Q. Shi,et al.  An efficient JPEG steganographic scheme using uniform embedding , 2012, 2012 IEEE International Workshop on Information Forensics and Security (WIFS).

[22]  V. Vaidehi,et al.  Gabor Transform based Image Steganography , 2007 .

[23]  Amir-Masoud Eftekhari-Moghadam,et al.  Digital Image Steganography Based on Assignment Algorithm and Combination of DCT-IWT , 2012, 2012 Fourth International Conference on Computational Intelligence, Communication Systems and Networks.

[24]  Bin Li,et al.  A new cost function for spatial image steganography , 2014, 2014 IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP).

[25]  Jean-Luc Dugelay,et al.  A Data Mapping Method for Steganography and Its Application to Images , 2008, Information Hiding.

[26]  Vijay Kumar,et al.  Performance evaluation of DWT based image steganography , 2010, 2010 IEEE 2nd International Advance Computing Conference (IACC).

[27]  Ali Kanso,et al.  A robust chaotic algorithm for digital image steganography , 2014, Commun. Nonlinear Sci. Numer. Simul..

[28]  A.A. Abdelwahab,et al.  A discrete wavelet transform based technique for image data hiding , 2008, 2008 National Radio Science Conference.

[29]  T. Narasimmalou,et al.  Optimized discrete wavelet transform based steganography , 2012, 2012 IEEE International Conference on Advanced Communication Control and Computing Technologies (ICACCCT).

[30]  Sung Wook Baik,et al.  Image steganography for authenticity of visual contents in social networks , 2017, Multimedia Tools and Applications.

[31]  Ming-Shi Wang,et al.  A hybrid DWT-SVD copyright protection scheme based on k-means clustering and visual cryptography , 2009, Comput. Stand. Interfaces.

[32]  Po-Yueh Chen,et al.  A Modified Side Match Scheme for Image Steganography , 2009 .

[33]  Vijay H. Mankar,et al.  Current status and key issues in image steganography: A survey , 2014, Comput. Sci. Rev..

[34]  Kevin Curran,et al.  Digital image steganography: Survey and analysis of current methods , 2010, Signal Process..

[35]  Tanveer J. Siddiqui,et al.  Singular Value Decomposition Based Image Steganography Using Integer Wavelet Transform , 2015, SIRS.

[36]  Eero P. Simoncelli,et al.  Image quality assessment: from error visibility to structural similarity , 2004, IEEE Transactions on Image Processing.

[37]  Po-Yueh Chen,et al.  A DWT Based Approach for Image Steganography , 2006 .