Integer Wavelet Transform and Arnold Transform based image steganography with cryptanalysis

Abstract

The rapid development on the field of communication require a secure exchange of information between the sender and the reciepient. Information hiding techniques are widely used in the field of communication such as military applications, scientific research etc. Information hiding is a general process or term which deals with embedding the message for communication in the content. Otherwise we can say that it refers to either producing the data to be hidden making the existence of secret information to be unnoticeable. This process leads to prevent unauthorized access. There are two inputs in the steganography process, one is the cover object and the other is secret object, both these inputs may be image, video, audio e.t.c. Depending upon these cover objects, it can be categorized into image steganography, video steganography, audio steganography e.t.c. In this paper both cover and secret objects are image. In this paper image steganography is performed with IWT (Integer Wavelet Transform). Normally the steganography process is performed with DWT (Discrete Wavelet Transform), while applying this transform there exists floating point coefficients,which leads to floating point truncation results in loss of information, to avoid this problem we choose IWT. Arnold transform is an image scrambling technique applied to the secret image to ensure security to it.