High capacity steganography based on IWT using eight-way CVD and [formula omitted]-LSB ensuring secure communication

Abstract

The state-of-the-art integer wavelet transform (IWT) based steganographic techniques suffer from low embedding capacity. To overcome this limitation, an IWT based secure high capacity steganographic technique is proposed. The aim of this work is to develop and evaluate new technique to offer performance improvements over the existing approaches. The vertical and horizontal subbands are utilized by eight-way coefficient value differencing (CVD) technique. These subbands are fragmented into non-overlapping 3 × 3 blocks. The n-LSB method (n is the number of bits) is used in the diagonal subband. The distortion due to n-LSB method is reduced using 2n correction technique. The proposed technique accomplishes an average embedding capacity of 2.63 bpp which is better than the recent state-of-the-art works. To enhance the security of the system, secret data are embedded in a non-sequential manner in the horizontal and vertical subbands. The proposed technique withstands the steganalysis test. It also resists the series of tests provided by StirMark Benchmark 4.0.