A Secure Steganography Method Based on Integer Lifting Wavelet Transform

Steganography plays an important role in secret communication in digital worlds and open environments like Internet. Undetectability and imperceptibility of confidential data are major challenges of steganography methods. This article presents a secure steganography method in frequency domain based on partitioning approach. The cover image is partitioned into 8×8 blocks and then integer wavelet transform through lifting scheme is performed for each block. The symmetric RC4 encryption method is applied to secret message to obtain high security and authentication. Tree Scan Order is performed in frequency domain to find proper location for embedding secret message. Secret message is embedded in cover image with minimal degrading of the quality. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method has achieved superior performance in terms of high imperceptibility of stego-image and it is secure against statistical attack in comparison with existing methods.