An Improved ECG Steganography Using Integer Wavelet Transform and Offset Coefficient with LSB Substitution

Abstract

In this work, we present an improved steganography for electrocardiogram (ECG) hosts to solve the issues of existing ECG steganographic methods, which have less hiding capacity and insufficient signal-to-noise ratio (SNR)/ peak SNR (PSNR). Based on the integer wavelet transform (IWT) domain, sensitive (or private) data such as patients’ data and personal information can be efficiently embedded in an ECG host via the IWT coefficient adjustment and the least significant bit (LSB) technique. Simulations confirmed that the SNR/ PSNR, and payload of the proposed method outperform those of existing techniques. In addition, the proposed method is capable of resisting attacks, such as cropping, Gaussian noise-addition inversion, scaling, translation, and truncation attacks from third parties (or adversaries). Due to the fast computation time, the proposed method can be employed in portable biometric devices or wearable electronics.