A robust steganographic wavelet-based system for resistant message hiding under error prone networks

A wavelet-based steganographic method is proposed for robust message hiding. The message is embedded into the most significant wavelet coefficients of a cover image to provide invisibility and resistance against lossy transmission, compression or other distortion. The architecture consists of three modules. In the first module, the initial message is enciphered by an encryption algorithm. The enciphered message is imprinted onto a white-background image to construct the message-image to be hidden. In the second module, the cover image is decomposed into two levels with seven subbands, using the DWT. Next, qualified significant wavelet trees (QSWTs), which are paths of significant wavelet coefficients, are estimated for the highest energy pair of subbands. In the third module, the message-image is redundantly embedded to the coefficients of the best QSWTs and the IDWT is applied to provide the stego-image. The robustness and efficiency of the proposed steganographic system is evaluated under various loss rates, combined with different JPEG compression ratios.