Integer Wavelet Bit-Plane Complexity Segmentation Image Steganography

Abstract

Steganography is a technique to hide secret information in some other data (called vessel) without leaving any apparent evidence of data alteration. All of the traditional steganographic techniques have limited information-hiding capacity. They can hide only 10% (or less) of the data amounts of the vessel. This is because the principle of those techniques is either to replace a special part of the frequency components of the vessel image or to replace all the least significant bits of a multi valued image with the secret information. In this paper, an image steganography system is proposed, in which the data hiding (embedding) is realized in bit planes of sub band wavelets coefficients obtained by using the Integer Wavelet Transform (IWT). To increase data hiding capacity while keeping the imperceptibility of the hidden data, the replaceable IWT coefficient areas are defined by a complexity measure used in the Bit-Plane Complexity Segmentation Steganography (BPCS). This technique to hide secret information is based on the property of human vision system and not on a programming technique. Its information hiding capacity can be as large as 50% of the original image data. The proposed system can recover the hidden message in a lossless manner if the communication channel is ideal. The extracted message contains some erroneous bits since the communications channel is not ideal. document provides some minimal guidelines (and requirements) for writing a research paper. Issues related to the contents, originality, contributions, organization, bibliographic information, and writing style are briefly covered. Evaluation criteria and due dates for the research paper are also provided.