Performance enhanced image steganography systems using transforms and optimization techniques

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• 作者：S. Uma Maheswari ; D. Jude Hemanth
• 关键词：Contourlet transform ; Frequency domain steganography ; Fresnelet transform ; Genetic Algorithm ; Particle Swarm Optimization.
• 刊名：Multimedia Tools and Applications
• 出版年：2017
• 出版时间：January 2017
• 年：2017
• 卷：76
• 期：1
• 页码：415-436
• 全文大小：
• 刊物类别：Computer Science
• 刊物主题：Multimedia Information Systems; Computer Communication Networks; Data Structures, Cryptology and Information Theory; Special Purpose and Application-Based Systems;
• 出版者：Springer US
• ISSN：1573-7721
• 卷排序：76

文摘

Image steganography is the art of hiding highly sensitive information onto the cover image. An ideal approach to image steganography must satisfy two factors: high quality of stego image and high embedding capacity. Conventionally, transform based techniques are widely preferred for these applications. The commonly used transforms for steganography applications are Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT), Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) etc. In this work, frequency domain transforms such as Fresnelet Transform (FT) and Contourlet Transform (CT) are used for the data hiding process. The secret data is normally hidden in the coefficients of these transforms. However, data hiding in transform coefficients yield less accurate results since the coefficients used for data hiding are selected randomly. Hence, in this work, optimization techniques such as Genetic Algorithm (GA) and Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) are used for improving the performance of the steganography system. GA and PSO are used to find the best coefficients in order to hide the Quick Response (QR) coded secret data. This approach yields an average PSNR of 52.56 dB and an embedding capacity of 902,136 bits. These experimental results validate the practical feasibility of the proposed methodology for security applications.