Combining a spread spectrum technique with error-correction code to design an immune stegosystem

Steganography is the art and science of hiding that a communication is taken place. It embeds the secret file (text, audio or image) in other carrier file. Text in image steganography is considered in this work. The proposed stegosystem uses Spread Spectrum technique which is applied in spatial domain together with error correction coding. These are used to increase the security and robustness of the system. Random location selection within the cover image pixels is also proposed in the work. Improvement has been achieved in robustness on the expense of reducing the capacity of hiding. The imperceptibility of the stego image is assessed by using peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) measure. Attacks in the form of lossy compression and additive noise are considered. The performance of the proposed system has shown good immunity to moderate levels of channel noise and lossy compression ratios.