Blind Key Based Attack Resistant Audio Steganography Using Cocktail Party Effect

Abstract

Steganography is a popular technique of digital data security. Among all digital steganography methods, audio steganography is very delicate as human auditory system is highly sensitive to noise; hence small modification in audio can make significant audible impact. In this paper, a key based blind audio steganography method has been proposed which is built on discrete wavelet transform (DWT) as well as discrete cosine transform (DCT) and adheres to Kerckhoff's principle. Here image has been used as secret message which is preprocessed using Arnold's Transform. To make the system more robust and undetectable, a well-known problem of audio analysis has been explored here, known as Cocktail Party Problem, for wrapping stego audio. The robustness of the proposed method has been tested against Steganalysis attacks like noise addition, random cropping, resampling, requantization, pitch shifting, and mp3 compression. The quality of resultant stego audio and retrieved secret image has been measured by various metrics, namely, "peak signal-to-noise ratio"; "correlation coefficient"; "perceptual evaluation of audio quality"; "bit error rate"; and "structural similarity index." The embedding capacity has also been evaluated and, as seen from the comparison result, the proposed method has outperformed other existing DCT-DWT based technique.