Concealing information within non-secret data using Gabor filter

Steganography is the art of covered writing or hidden writing. The main concern of steganography (image hiding) methods is to embed a secret image into a cover image in such a way that the cover should remain as similar as possible to its original version. In addition the cover image should remain robust with respect to usual attacks. In this research, we present a method that tries to cover all above mentioned concerns. The secret and cover images are divided into blocks of size 4*4. Each block in secret image is taken as a texture pattern for which the most similar block is found among the blocks of the cover image. To find the most suitable cover image with respect to the message image we have used Gabor filter to measure the similarity between texture patterns. After getting the most suitable cover image, the embedding of the message image is done by using two sided side matching method. Our experimental results showed a high level of capacity, robustness and minimum distortion on standard images.