Robust and secured image-adaptive data hiding

Rapid growth in the demand and consumption of digital information in past decade has led to valid concerns over issues such as content security, authenticity and digital right management. Imperceptible data hiding in digital images is an excellent example of demonstration of handling these issues. Classical Cryptography is related with concealing the content of messages, whereas, Steganography is related with concealing the existence of communication by hiding the messages in cover. This paper presents a robust and secured method of embedding high volume of text information in digital Cover-images without incurring any perceptual distortion. It is robust against intentional or unintentional attacks such as image compression, tampering, resizing, filtering and Additive White Gaussian Noise (AWGN). The schemes available in the literature can deal with these attacks individually, whereas the proposed work is a single methodology that can survive all these attacks. Image Adaptive Energy Thresholding (AET) is used while selecting the embedding locations in frequency domain. Coding framework with Class Dependent Coding Scheme (CDCS) along with redundancy and interleaving of embedded information gives enhancement in data hiding capacity. Perceptual quality of images after data hiding has been tested using Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR) whereas statistical variations in selected Image Quality Measures (IQMs) are observed with respect to Steganalysis. The results have been compared with existing algorithms like STOOL in spatial domain, COX in DCT domain and CDMA in DWT domain.