A Hybrid Image Steganography Using Chaotic Maps in DCT Domain

Abstract

In this paper, a robust image steganography approach is proposed using chaotic maps and discrete cosine transform (DCT). The energy compaction property of DCT and deterministic pseudorandom characteristics of chaotic map are exploited to develop novel hybrid image steganography in DCT domain. The proposed technique applies DCT on the original image, and two logistic maps (LM) are used to identify the random locations (row and column, respectively) for secret data embedding. Whereas sine map (SM) embeds the secret information in the cover media according to different initial and control parameters. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method has high embedding capacity (EC), excellent stego-image quality and capability to withstand against brute attacks. Proposed method outperforms the existing steganography techniques in terms of EC, peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR), and universal image quality index (Q), and bit error rate (BER).