Abstract
Steganography is the process of hiding secret information in other multimedia files, like image, audio and video, such that any unauthorized person does not have any clue of the hidden secret data. Due to the recent computational advancements, there has been an increased risk in secure communication and thus, steganography has become one of the most researched domains in information security. In this paper, a novel method of steganography is approached where the cover image is scrambled using graph theory; then the secret data is embedded in the LH, HL and HH planes using LSB embedding of the cover image after applying Haar forward transform to get the embedded image. The secret data hidden in the cover image is first converted to a QR-like (Quick Response) image and then to be embedded in the cover media. The stego image is obtained after reverse Haar transform and descrambling of the embedded image. The proposed method when applied to a set of grayscale images, not only gave us stego images with greater embedding capacity but also high Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR) and a low Mean Square Error (MSE) and very appreciable Normalized Cross-Correlation (NCC) along with a good Structural Similarity Index Matrix (SSIM) when compared to the cover images.
Highlights
The amount of multimedia data being transmitted online is growing rapidly due to the swift development of internet technologies [1, 2]
Since graph theory leads to very less computational complexity, we can apply the same algorithm to the output of the previous operation to get extensive scrambling of the images
The proposed method has been tested on ten different grayscale images, each of size 512*512
Summary
The amount of multimedia data being transmitted online is growing rapidly due to the swift development of internet technologies [1, 2]. This multimedia data can be of personal, public, governmental or military use. Since the governmental or military data is very sensitive in nature; it faces significant threats while being transmitted online. Data security deals with shielding of data from unauthorized and illegal access [3]. These sensitive and critical data must be securely transmitted over the channel. Network-specific encryption of data is not trustworthy and consistent; we need an additional method to protect this sensitive data when it is transmitted over the channel so that the secret data cannot be retrieved even when the network routes have been accessed by an unauthorized party
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