A color image steganography in hybrid FRT–DWT domain

Abstract

In this paper, a color image steganography technique based on Finite Ridgelet Transform (FRT) and Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) is proposed. The FRT is applied on the cover color image to get Ridgelet coefficients of each color channel of cover color image and a single level DWT is applied to get different wavelet coefficients, which are further modified by encrypted channel values of secret color image to get stego color image. In the proposed method, Arnold scrambling is used to encrypt channels of secret color image. The proposed technique is tested for its effectiveness on various types of standard color images and the results showed improved imperceptibility of the stego image compared to the existing technique. Further, the embedding capacity of the proposed technique is high.