A novel approach to secure image based steganography by using eigenvalue and eigenvector principles

Abstract

In this paper, a novel steganography technique by using the concepts of eigenvalues and eigenvectors is presented. In our proposed method, first a symmetric transformation matrix is calculated based on the information of the cover image and a combination of the cover image and the secret image. Afterward, the eigenvalues and eigenvectors of the transformation matrix are extracted and sent as a secret key. In this approach, in order to improve the performance of proposed method a special symmetric matrix is proposed. In receiver, the secret image is extracted from cover image by using secret key. The main privilege of the proposed method is high capacity and security. In the proposed method as another advantage the cover image is not changed. The experimental results demonstrate the superiority of proposed method in terms of data capacity and image quality.