QR code based image steganography via variable step size firefly algorithm and lifting wavelet transform

Abstract

The Image steganography is the art of hiding secret message onto the source image. A good approach to the steganography must provide for the high stego image quality. An efficient Steganographic method is proposed for embedding secrete message into the image. In this paper, a wavelet domain steganography is adopted for hiding a large amount of data with high security, good invisibility and no loss to the secret message. Here, the frequency domain steganography based information hiding technique using the lifting wavelet transform (LWT) with variation step size firefly algorithm (VSSFA) is envisaged. Our proposed work consists of three phases such as the optimal parameter selection, embedding phase and the extraction phase. In this method, the lifting wavelet coefficients of the Least Significant Bit (LSB) at high frequency sub bands are used to embed the QR coded secret message. The same process is repeated to the extraction process. The performance of the proposed steganography method is analyzed through various constraints such as the Mean Square Error (MSE), Tamper Assessment Factor (TAF), Normalize correlation (NC), bit error rate (BER) and the peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR). The proposed scheme maintains the stego-image quality with an average PSNR value of 63.76 dB and an embedding capacity of 5624 bits.