Image steganography by wavelet matching

Abstract

We introduce a new steganography method for embedding message bits into images by utilizing the mathematical relation between the image and transformation domains. The proposed method matches the message bit sequences with the coefficients of the discrete Haar wavelet transformation (DHWT) by modifying the pixels related to those coefficients. The matching process is applied separately for each image block, which is defined with respect to the dimension of the wavelet transform. The algorithm needs to change one pixel out of all the pixels in each block to represent the message bit sequence to be embedded. A minimum amount of degradation provides better stego-image quality than the-state-of-the-art methods. In addition, the experiments performed on different image databases show that the proposed method is more robust against both blind and targeted steganalysis methods, especially in low payload capacities.