Eliminating Cover Image Requirement in Discrete Wavelet Transform based Digital Image Steganography

Abstract

Image steganography is the art and science of hiding secret image into digital media such that no one apart from the intended recipient is able to detect the existence of the information. There are many different carriers that can be used to hide the information such as digital images, videos, sound files and other computer files but digital images are the most popular. In this paper, a method has been proposed using which a large size secret image can be hidden into small size cover image securely. The main aim here is the absolute invisibility of the large size secret image. The secret image is first scrambled by using Arnold transformation. Haar Discrete Wavelet Transformation (DWT) is then applied on cover image and Arnold transformed secret image, followed by Alpha Blending operation. Then the Haar Inverse Discrete Wavelet Transformation (IDWT) is applied to obtain the stego image. At the receiver side, first the cover image is obtained from the stego image. Then Haar DWT is applied on the cover image and the stego image followed by the alpha blending operation. Haar IDWT is applied on the resulting image. Then by applying Arnold transformation, the secret image is obtained. The proposed method does not require the sender to send the cover image to the receiver for obtaining the secret image.The performance of the proposed method is investigated by comparing the cover image and the stego image in terms of Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR), Mean Square Error (MSE) and Normalized Cross Correlation (NCC). Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and accuracy of the proposed method.

Evaluation review of effectiveness and security metrics performance on information technology domain

“…It also evaluates and compares algorithm the effectiveness and stego-image quality [26]. It evaluates the square error representing the difference between the cover image and stego image, and also determines the image quality parameters, as to avoid problem of embedding data and improved version of the image technique [23]- [26].…”

“…It evaluates of the similarity between the original cover image in terms of size and the stego image after embedded process [23].…”

A Daubechies DWT Based Image Steganography Using Smoothing Operation

“…Prabakaran and Bhavani [10], proposed elevated embedding capacity based data hiding technique, which hide large size of secret image inside relative small cover image. DWT based blind image steganography technique is proposed by [13], which eliminated the host or cover image requirement at receiver.…”

Efficient image steganography using graph signal processing

“…Cryptography modifies the data so that it cannot be understood by an eaves dropper, whereas steganography keeps the existence of the hidden message secret; this ultimate feature makes it protective for an observer [3]. Exchanging encrypted information is practically detectable because it may draw the attention of an observer, whereas invisible form of information will not.…”

“…The existing transfer domain techniques are based on fast Fourier transform [7], discrete cosine transform [8], curvelet transform [9], discrete wavelet transform (DWT) etc. [2,3].…”