Optimal location using genetic algorithms for chaotic image steganography technique based on discrete framelet transform

Abstract

The development of network technology and its use have led society into the internet world and communication through digital data. The ease of access to digital resources and the possibility of unauthorized copies and distribution of them have gave rise to the significant challenge of protecting the ownership of these data. In this context, steganography is cited as a possible solution to some of these problems. Steganography can be understood as the practice of hiding secret information within another object, as for instance a text, image or video, such that the presence of this hidden information is not evident and it can be extracted if necessary. In this paper we provide an image steganography algorithm in order to insert a grayscale secret image into a RGB color cover image. This algorithm is based on a general hybrid chaos map and a 3D shift function applied to the pixels of a color image. In order to select suitable hiding places in the host image, we develop a genetic algorithm with permutation encoding aiming to optimize this task. We demonstrate empirically the effectiveness of the proposed method from various perspectives, including transparency, security, and resistance.