Aditi Singh, K S Venkatesh and Vikas Patidar, Indian Institute of Technology - Kanpur, India

In image steganography, the transfer domain provides better concealment of the secret image in the cover image, and has therefore proved much more reliable than spatial domain. In this paper, we attempt to maximize the retrieved secret PSNR against the original secret, while simultaneously minimizing the cover image degradation. This paper is built upon DiscreteWavelet Transform to process the image while the Least Significant Bit method to store the information. We follow a principle of priority ordering the wavelet subspaces of both the secret and the cover with a view to make for the most efficient concealment. We propose the product of the secret and cover image PSNR and SSIM measures as the quantities to be maximized as it provides a more comprehensive evaluation of system performance, and study the performance against the choice of the number of levels of wavelet decompositions.

Cover, Secret, Stego, Embed, HAAR-DWT, LSB