contsteg contourlet-based steganography methodcontsteg contourlet-based隐写术方法.pdfVIP

Wireless Sensor Network, 2009, 3, 163-170 doi:10.4236/wsn.2009.13022 Published Online October 2009 (http://www.SciRP.org/journal/wsn/). ContSteg: Contourlet-Based Steganography Method Hedieh SAJEDI, Mansour JAMZAD Computer Engineering Department, Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran E-mail : A_sajedi@, Jamzad@ Received April 26, 2009; revised May 20, 2009; accepted May 25, 2009 Abstract A category of techniques for secret data communication called steganography hides data in multimedia me- diums. It involves embedding secret data into a cover-medium by means of small perceptible and statistical degradation. In this paper, a new adaptive steganography method based on contourlet transform is presented that provides large embedding capacity. We called the proposed method ContSteg. In contourlet decomposi- tion of an image, edges are represented by the coefficients with large magnitudes. In ContSteg, these coeffi- cients are considered for data embedding because human eyes are less sensitive in edgy and non-smooth re- gions of images. For embedding the secret data, contourlet subbands are divided into 4×4 blocks. Each bit of secret data is hidden by exchanging the value of two coefficients in a block of contourlet coefficients. Ac- cording to the experimental results, the proposed method is capable of providing a larger embedding capacity without causing noticeable distortions of stego-images in comparison with a similar wavelet-based steg- anography approach. The result of examining the proposed method with two of the most powerful steganaly- sis algorithms show that we could successfully embed data in cover-images with the average embedding ca- pacity of 0.05 bits per pixel. Keywords: Information Hiding, Steganography, Steganalysis, Contourlet Transform 1. Introduction