Secret Image Sharing and Steganography Using Haar Wavelet Transform

Abstract

Image steganography enables secure communication whether even intimating the enemy regarding the occurrence of communication. Steganography and cryptography play a vast role in rendering effective security for the secret data. However, when the presence of the secret message is revealed then, the secret message is disclosed, which is the major drawback of the existing strategies. Thus, the paper proposes an effective image sharing and steganography method using the Haar wavelet. There are two phases in this research: encoding and decoding phase. In the first phase, the encoding phase, where the secret message is embedded in the input image using the proposed Haar wavelet-based steganography, while in the decoding phase, the secret message is uncovered. In the decoding phase, the Lagrange's interpolation is applied that decodes the secret message from the stego or embedded image. The great significance of the method is that the greater degree of security is rendered against the security attacks and is a robust strategy for combining the secret sharing of messages and steganography. The analysis of the proposed method with respect to the existing methods is enabled using the 500 stego images acquired from the UCID database. The comparative analysis of the proposed method based on the metrics, such as Peak Signal-To-Noise Ratio (PSNR) and Structural Similarity (SSIM) index reveals that the proposed method acquired a maximal PSNR and SSIM of 57.142 dB and 0.9991, respectively.