High Capacity Lossless Secure Image Steganography using Wavelets

The modern steganography presents a challenging task of embedding data that should be imperceptible to the human visual system (HVS) and also escape the detection of powerful machine vision of computers. In this paper we present a high capacity, lossless, secure wavelet steganographic algorithm in which payload bitstream is encrypted and embedded into the wavelet coefficients of the cover image to derive a stego-image. The payload is embedded in the approximation band of the wavelet domain that increases its robustness. It is observed through simulations that mean square error (MSE), mean absolute error (MAE), bit error rate (BER) and histogram analysis that the pay load is retrieved without any errors and its performance is better than the earlier insignificant coefficient replacement (ICR) technique.