Scramble and Transform: An Image Data Hiding Technique

Security is the most important concern in steganography which means hiding from visual or statistical attacks. Current steganography methods usually embed the secret data in the spatial or transform domains. Modern steganalysis methods extract features from different possible domains in which the data is hidden. To provide a high secure steganography method, this paper proposes to hide data in a secret domain. The secret domain is achieved by scrambling the image in the spatial domain and then applying integer wavelet transform. The message bits are embedded in the LSBs of randomly selected wavelet coefficients. Applying inverse wavelet transform and unscrambling, the stego image in the spatial domain is obtained. Experimental results were carried out on BOSSbase 1.01 database, and the results are compared against LSB matching (LSBM), highly undetectable stego (HUGO) and spatial embedding of universal wavelet residual distortion (S-UNIWARD) steganographic methods.