Image Steganography Based on Wavelet Transform and Histogram Modification

Abstract

Recently, digital communication has become a critical necessity and so the Internet has become the most used medium and most efficient for digital communication. At the same time, data transmitted through the Internet are becoming more vulnerable. Therefore, the issue of maintaining secrecy of data is very important, especially if the data is personal or confidential. Steganography has provided a reliable method for solving such problems. Steganography is an effective technique in secret communication in digital worlds where data sharing and transfer is increasing through the Internet, emails and other ways. The main challenges of steganography methods are the undetectability and the imperceptibility of confidential data. This paper presents a steganography method in frequency domain. Haar Wavelet Transform is applied for decomposition of gray level cover image into four sub-bands. The secret image is hidden in the high frequency HH sub-band after applying the histogram modification followed by scrambling process. A Histogram modification is adopted, to scale the secret image to normalize its values, that manipulates the secret image from bright image to dark. Thus the secret image becomes invisible so it can be hidden in the high frequency sub-band.  Scrambling the positions can be for rows then columns, which will give strong security of the hiding process. The experimental results demonstrate the proposed method has achieved superior performance in terms of quantifiable measurement (PSNR and correlation) and in terms of visual quality. The proposed method propositions good imperceptible results and good response for against the various image attacks.