Secure and imperceptible digital image steganographic algorithm based on diamond encoding in DWT domain

Abstract

This paper presents a new efficient embedding algorithm in the wavelet domain of digital images based on the diamond encoding (DE) scheme. Current discrete wavelet transform (DWT) steganography adds an unacceptable distortion to the images and is considered as an ineffective in terms of security. Applying the DE scheme to the current DWT steganographic methods solves the problems of these methods, and reduces the distortion added to the images, and thus improves the embedding efficiency. The proposed algorithm first converts the secret image into a sequence of base-5 digits. After that, the cover image is transformed into the DWT domain and segmented into 2 × 1 coefficient pairs. The DE scheme is used then to change at most one coefficient of each coefficient pair to embed the base-5 digits. Experimental results depict that the proposed algorithm is more efficient in embedding compared to other methods in terms of embedding payload and image quality. Moreover, the proposed algorithm is attacked by well-known steganalysis software. Results are showing that the proposed algorithm is secure against the powerful universal steganalyzer “ensemble classifier” and the histogram attack. The results also reveal that the proposed algorithm is robust against different image processing attacks such as compression, added noise, and cropping attacks.