HIGHLY EFFICIENT IMAGE STEGANOGRAPHY USING HAAR DWT FOR HIDING MISCELLANEOUS DATA

Protecting private data exchanged over the Internet and controlling access to this data have become a growing privacy and confidentiality concern. Digital image steganography helps conceal private data within a cover image to obtain a new image, practically indistinguishable from the original, in such a way that unauthorized individuals cannot detect the presence of the concealed data in the new cover. Capacity size of the cover image and imperceptibility are therefore considered critical requirements to assess the performance of steganography algorithms. This paper presents a highly efficient steganography algorithm that is capable of hiding a large size of miscellaneous data (text files, binary images, coloured images or a combination of these data types) in a single cover image using Haar Wavelet transform. Details of the proposed embedding and extraction algorithms for different data types are presented and discussed. The performance of the proposed steganography method is assessed in terms of the capacity of the cover image, imperceptibility and robustness. The obtained experimental results and observations demonstrated that the developed algorithms are highly efficient in terms of the capacity size of the cover image while maintaining a relatively low mean square error (MSE), high peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and a reasonable robustness against various attacks.