Effective payload and improved security using HMT Contourlet transform in medical image steganography

Abstract

This paper implements a novel approach for image steganography based on Hidden Markov Tree (HMT) Contourlet transform. In this paper, the biomedical image considers as a cover image and it is mapped to a specific frequency domain by applying HMT Contourlet transform. Then canny edge detection method implemented to detect the smooth edges to hide the secret data. The secret data is encrypted by using Paillier cryptosystem in a new location of the cover image. Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm developed for the selection of the best place to locate the number of particles in a new location. The proposed method prevents the medical image from the various attacks such as rotate, crop, histogram, salt & pepper, blur and resize provides the robustness, thereby reduces to 8.19%, 10.88%, 24.03%, 15.27%, 13.21% and 14.35%. The performance measures of Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR), Mean Square Error (MSE) are calculated to show the better performance compared with the existing techniques.