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.
Highlights
In the present era, communicating through Internet has become vulnerable as there may be several intruders who can eavesdrop for secret messages to capture and disburse them for unlawful misconducts
This proposed method has been applied on several sets of cover audio and secret images, though, for efficient use of space, here only 2 sets of robustness test results have been presented for Steganalysis attacks
If the exact same key is not used during embedding and extraction, LFSR will generate different set of pseudorandom numbers using which secret image cannot be extracted from the stego audio
Summary
In the present era, communicating through Internet has become vulnerable as there may be several intruders who can eavesdrop for secret messages to capture and disburse them for unlawful misconducts. Nowadays it is most necessary to camouflage secret message in such a way that stego cannot be identified as carrier of secret message. Camouflaging secret message through carrier objects introduces the age-old technique of steganography. With the current enormous use of Internet and elevation of various Steganalysis attacks, it is required to have an extra shield to protect steganography techniques. This is the reason cocktail party effect in audio steganography has been explored to ensure enhanced security during data transmission
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