Hiding Secrets in Electrocardiogram Based on Integer Wavelet Transform with Coefficient Adjustment and LSB Substitution

Abstract

In this paper, we present an efficient data hiding for electrocardiogram (ECG) hosts to solve the issues of existing ECG steganographic methods, which have less hiding capacity and insufficient signal-to-noise ratio (SNR)/ peak SNR (PSNR). Based on the integer wavelet transform (IWT), private (or sensitive) data such as patients’ diagnosis and personal information can be embedded in an ECG host via the IWT coefficient adjustment and the least significant bit (LSB) technique. Simulations indicated that the SNR (or PSNR), and payload of the proposed method outperform those of existing techniques. In addition, the proposed method is capable of resisting attacks, such as cropping, Gaussian noise-addition inversion, scaling, translation, and truncation attacks from third parties (or adversaries). Since the proposed method has low computational complexity, our method can be employed in portable biometric devices or wearable electronics.