Exploring steganography for low bit rate wavelet based coder in image retrieval system

An image retrieval system that provides an efficient retrieval, management and transmission of selected image(s) from the database is proposed. The key point of research is utilizing a steganographic technique to achieve the efficient use of resources by embedding attributes into the image contents. To avoid the degradation of image quality, the attributes are invisibly embedded in the edge representations of the compressed domain of the ZTE (zerotree entropy)/modified SPIHT (set partitioning in hierarchical trees) wavelet based coder. The evaluations of the proposed algorithm have shown several significant advantages. For example, (1) fast transmission of the retrieved image to the receiver, (2) it allows searching based on the retrieval images, (3) no reprocessing of the attributes for other applications, (4) no extra bits required for the conventional thumbnail and (5) no extra bits for the attributes.