Image steganography using contourlet transform and matrix decomposition techniques

Abstract

This paper presents the transform domain image steganography schemes using three popular matrix factorization techniques and contourlet transform. It is known that security of image steganography is mainly evaluated using undetectability of stego image when steganalyzer examines it in order to detect the presence of hidden secret information. Good imperceptibility only suggests eavesdropper’s inability to suspect about the hidden information; however stego image may be analyzed by applying certain statistical checks when it is being transmit- ted through the channel. This work focusses on improving undetectability by employing ma- trix decomposition techniques along with transform domain image steganography. Singular value decomposition (SVD), QR factorization, Nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) are employed to decompose contourlet coefficients of cover image and secret is embedded into its matrix factorized coefficients. The variety of investigations include the effect of matrix decomposition techniques on major attributes of image steganography like imperceptibility, robustness to a variety of image processing operations, and universal steganalysis perfor- mance. Better imperceptibility, large capacity, and poor detection accuracy compared to existing work validate the efficacy of the proposed image steganography algorithm. Compa- rative analysis amongst three matrix factorization methods is also presented and analyzed.