Bit Reduction based Audio Steganography Algorithm

Today, the development of data hiding techniques for information security or confidential communication is a subject of great demand and interest. The main purpose of most studies is to develop imperceptible hiding techniques and to hide more information with as little distortion as possible. Similarly, the main purpose of the presented study is to hide an image inside an audio file with less distortion. For this purpose, a bit reduction-based approach is used. The difference between the original audio file and the bit-reduced audio file can be classified as insignificant mostly. By adding the small changes made on this difference to the reduced audio file and saving it while preserving the original bit depth, the audio file containing the hidden image (stego-audio) is obtained. At the stage of data extracting, bit reduction is performed on the stego-audio first. The difference between stego-audio and reduced stego-audio includes the hidden image. As a result of this study, relatively higher bits can be hidden inside an audio file with very low distortion. The application results show that the developed algorithm is successful in terms of SNR and PSNR. The MATLAB codes of the developed application and the cover audio are available in the link: https://bit.ly/31Nynfe