NEW TECHNIQUE FOR HIGH EMBEDDING CAPACITY AND IMPERCEPTIBILITY AUDIO STEGANOGRAPHY ALGORITHM
HAIDER ISMAEL SHAHADI *
Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Babylon, Hillah, 51002, Babil, Iraq.
*Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Abstract
Steganography hides secret messages in a cover signal in such a way that makes it imperceptible for a communication eavesdropper. There are several approaches based audio steganography available, but most of them lack one or more feature such as high security and imperceptibility at high embedding rate. This paper presents a new algorithm for high capacity and quality audio steganography based on discrete wavelet packet transform (DWPT) and adaptive hiding technique. The adaptive hiding technique is realized depending on the cover sample strength and a novel bit-block matching (BM) between the message and cover data. The proposed technique can provide very high embedding capacity reach up to 40% of the audio cover size with stego audio imperceptibility above 40 dB in terms of segmental signal to noise ratio (SNR). Furthermore, it has higher security than other related steganography algorithms which are based on known embedding positions. This is due to the proposed embedding technique hide message data adaptively in randomcover positions based on the BM results.
Keywords: Audio steganography, wavelet packet transform (WPT), imperceptibility, embedding capacity, security