Characteristic region based image steganography using Speeded-Up Robust Features technique

Steganography is the art and science of invisible communication. It is employed in different useful applications, like, safe circulation of secret data and Medical Imaging Systems. For most of the current steganography techniques, information hiding modifies almost all the cover components, which may negatively affect the visual quality of the image and increase the possibility of losing data after the possible attacks. This paper presents a new region based steganography technique, which hides data in the robust regions of the image. First, the Speeded-Up Robust Features (SURF) is used to find the most robust regions in the image. Then, the data embedding is achieved in a content-based manner by modifying the wavelet transform coefficients of those robust regions. Experimental results show the proposed algorithm allows hiding data invisibly with an accurate retrieval in the presence of lossy compression or noise. Moreover, the visual quality of the embedded image is high.