Characteristic region based image steganography using Speeded-Up Robust Features technique

Abstract

Steganography is the art and science of invisible communication. It is employed in different useful a pplications, like, safe circulation of secret data and Medical I maging Systems. For most of the current steganography techniques, i nformation hiding modifies almost all the cover components, wh ich may negatively affect the visual quality of the image a nd increase the possibility of losing data after the possible attac ks. This paper presents a new region based steganography technique , which hides data in the robust regions of the image. Firs t, the Speeded- Up Robust Features (SURF) is used to find the most robust regions in the image. Then, the data embedding is ac hieved in a content-based manner by modifying the wavelet trans form coefficients of those robust regions. Experimental results show the proposed algorithm allows hiding data invisibly with an accurate retrieval in the presence of lossy compres sion or noise. Moreover, the visual quality of the embedded image is high.