DIGITAL IMAGE STEGANOGRAPHY BASED ON WAVELET TRANSFORM

ABSTRACT

Steganography is the art and science of covert communication. The secret information can be
concealed incontent such as image, audio, or video. This paper provides a novel image
steganography technique to hide both image and key in color cover image using Discrete Wavelet
Transform (DWT) and Integer Wavelet Transform (IWT). There is no visual difference between the
stego image and the cover image. The extracted image is also similar to the secret image. This is
proved by the high PSNR (Peak Signal to Noise Ratio), value for both stego and extracted secret
image. The results are compared with the results of similar techniques and it is found that the
proposed technique is simple and gives better PSNR values than others.

INTRODUCTION

Recently, the information hiding technique has developed rapidly in the field of information security
and has received significant attention from both industry and academia. It contains two main
branches: digital watermarking and steganography. The former is mainly used for copyright
protection of electronic products while, the latter is a way of covert communication. The main
purpose of steganography is to convey the information secretly by concealing the very existence of
information in some other medium such as image, audio or video. The content used to embed
information is called as cover object. The cover along with the hidden information is called as stego-
object [1]. In this paper image is the cover and secret information is also an image. Both secret
image and stego key are embedded in the cover image to get stego image. The major objective of
steganography is to prevent some unintended observer from stealing or destroying the confidential
information. There are some factors to be considered when designing
a steganography system:
Invisibility: Invisibility is the ability to be unnoticed by the human.
Security: Even if an attacker realizes the existence of the information in the stego object it should
be impossible for the attacker to detect the information

DISCRETE WAVELATE TRANSFORM(DWT)

It stores the information in an image and removes noise efficiently. By using multi-resolution
technique different frequencies are analysed with different resolutions. Wavelets are localized
waves which have their energy concentrated in time or space for analysis of transient signals. A fast
computation of wavelet transforms which is easy to implement and reduces the computation time
and resources required is DWT which based on sub-band coding. [6]
A. Wavelet Family
There are different basic functions we can use as the mother wavelet for wavelet transformation.
Through translation and scaling the mother wavelet produces all wavelet functions used in the
transformation, so it determines the characteristics of the resulting wavelet transform. Therefore,
based on the particular application the appropriate mother wavelet should be chosen. Among
different types of wavelet families such as Haar, Daubechies4, Coiflet1, Symlet2, Meyer, Morlet,
Mexican Hat etc we use Haar Wavelet transform
B. Haar Wavelet Transform
In proposed system we are using Haar Wavelet type because it is the simple among all. In this
the low frequency wavelet coefficients are generated by averaging the two pixel values. High
frequency coefficients are generated by takinghalf of the difference of the same two pixels. The four
bands obtained are LL, LH, HL, and HH which is shown in Fig 1.The LL band is known as
approximation band, consists of low frequency wavelet coefficients, which consist of significant part
of the spatial domain image. The other bands are called as detail bands which consist of high
frequency coefficients and contain the edge details of the spatial domain image.
Step1: Column wise processing to get H and L
H = (Co Ce)
L = (Ce-[H /2])
Where Co: odd column , Ce: even column pixel values.
Step 2: Row wise processing to get LL, LH, HL and HH,
Separate odd and even rows of H and L,
Namely, Hodd odd row of H
Lodd odd row of L
Heven even row of H
Leven even row of L
LH = Lodd Leven
LL = Leven LH/2
HL = Hodd Heven
HH = Heven -HL/2


FLOW DIAGRAM
Step 1. First we take input image as cover image in
Step 2. Then apply discrete wavelet transform mechanism to compress the image.
Step 3. With the help of LSB algorithm, embed the secret data and compress image. After
embedding apply IDWT toget stego image at transmitter side.
Step 4.Exactly reverse process is done at the receiver side. On stego image apply DWT.
Step 5.Then we are extracting secret data from stego image.
Step 6.In validations we are calculate the MSE and PSNR values



CONCLUSION
This technique has two main objectives firstly that Steganography should provide the maximum
hiding capacity and the embedded data must be imperceptible to the observer. It was found that
both objectives are fulfilled by proposed method which gives high capacity in the cover image with
very little error.