Investigations on effective data hiding and compression schemes for image based steganography

Abstract

In recent years Digital Communication plays a major role and indivisible part of wireless applications Compared to Analog Communication transmission of secure data between users is a big issue in Digital communication To face this issue several different security techniques have been proposed ie steganography cryptography digital signature etc. Steganography is one of the security approaches which means hiding the data using a cover image or secret bits and it can be applied to images video or audio During past decades various data hiding and compression techniques have been proposed that consume more network bandwidth and the increase of vulnerability of attackers due to the behaviour of cipher text Among those Novel Joint Data Hiding and Compression has been proposed as a single module by combining data hiding and image compression simultaneously In this scheme a fixed threshold was used to select the compression technique by comparing it with a distortion value and evaluating the Side Match Vector Quantization index quality of residual blocks of an image However it may degrade the embedding capacity due to an inappropriate evaluation of SMVQ quality Hence in the first part of the research work Enhanced Optimized Novel Joint Data Hiding and Compression scheme is proposed that consists of both Discrete Cosine Transform and Imperialist Competitive Algorithm to choose optimal value based on the selection of compression technique It is done by evaluating the SMVQ quality while comparing with distortion value In this technique for each block of the image DCT is applied before Vector Quantization to transform each pixel into frequency domain. newline