Secure steganography using hybrid domain technique

Abstract

The steganography is used to hide information and communicate in secure way to the destination. In this paper we propose Secure Steganography using Hybrid Domain Technique (SSHDT). The cover image of different formats and sizes are considered and resized to dimensions of power of 2. The Daubechies Lifting Wavelet Transforms (LWT) is applied on cover image to generate four sub bands XA, XH, XV and XD. The XD band is considered and divided into two equal blocks say upper and lower for payload embedding. The payload of different formats are considered and resized to dimensions of power of 2. The payload is fragmented into four equal blocks. The integer Haar LWT is applied on two diagonal sub bands to generate F1 and F2 blocks and remaining two diagonal sub bands are retained in the spatial domain itself say S1 and S2. The S1, S2. F1 and F2 matrix are converted into single columns. The bit reversal is applied on each element of a column to scramble the payload index bit positions. The cube root is applied on coefficient of index value to scale down the magnitudes. The integer part is considered for embedding in XD band only of cover image to generate stego object. The Decision Factor Based Manipulation (DFBM) is used to scramble further stego object to improve security to the payload. Dubechies Inverse LWT (ILWT) is applied on XA, XH, XV and XD stego object to obtain stego image in spatial domain. it is observed that PSNR and embedding capacity of the proposed algorithm is better compared to the existing algorithm. © 2012 IEEE.