A New Steganography Method Using Integer Wavelet Transform and Least Significant Bit Substitution. (6th March 2019)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Kalita, Manashee; Tuithung, Themrichon; Majumder, Swanirbhar
• Is Part Of: Computer journal. Volume 62:Number 11(2019)
• Page Start: 1639
• Page End: 1655
• Publication Date: 2019-03-06
• Subjects: Transform domain -- IWT -- subband -- cover image -- stego image; Computers -- Periodicals; 005.1
• DOI: 10.1093/comjnl/bxz014
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0010-4620

Abstract

Abstract: Steganography is a data hiding technique, which is used for securing data. Both spatial and transform domains are used to implement a steganography method. In this paper, a novel transform domain method is proposed to provide a better data hiding method. The method uses a multi-resolution transform function, integer wavelet transform (IWT) that decomposes an image into four subbands: low-low, low-high, high-low and high-high subband. The proposed method utilizes only the three subbands keeping the low-low subband untouched which helps to improve the quality of the stego image. The method applies a coefficient value differencing approach to determine the number of secret bits to be embedded in the coefficients. The method shows a good performance in terms of embedding capacity, imperceptibility and robustness. A number of metrics are computed to show the quality of the stego image. It can also withstand RS steganalysis, Chi-squared test and Subtractive Pixel Adjacency Matrix steganalysis successfully. The deformation of the histogram and Pixel Difference Histogram for different embedding percentages are also demonstrated, which show a significant similarity with the original cover image. The proposed method shows an achievement of 2.3 bpp embedding capacity with a good quality of stego image.