Secure Image Steganography Using Dual-Tree Complex Wavelet Transform Block Matching

Abstract

Along with the thriving advancements in internet facility and related technology domain, information security becomes a key factor in the modern communication systems. Hackers have been trying to steal sensitive information and the data storing and communication becomes too risky via unsecured channels. Many techniques are used for safe and secure data communication and Steganography is one of the prominent ones. Hiding information among images is one of the popular and is known as Image Steganography. The current paper proposes a novel steganographic approach based on secret data hiding over DT-CWT subbands of the cover image. The high and low fidelity information in the secret data is separated and embedded in corresponding high and low frequency DT -CWT coefficients over best matched locations. The smooth and high-fidelity planes of the secret image get divided into small patches and intensity mapping is employed before finding the most suitable position in the subbands. Security keys were generated based on the embedded location and these keys are needed for decoding the embedded secret data at the receiver side. The efficiency and performance of various data samples at different resolutions are evaluated against the state of the art approaches using benchmarks and the results show better performance.