Blind image Steganography scheme using speeded-up robust features technique

Abstract

Steganography, which means “covered writing” in Greek, is the art and science of invisible communication. It is employed in various useful applications, e.g., copyright control of materials, companies‟ safe circulation of secret data, and in Medical Imaging Systems. Steganography can be achieved by hiding information in cover media. For most of the current steganography techniques, the information hiding process modifies almost all cover components. In this paper, a new method of steganography within digital images is presented. The method is a characteristic region based steganography using Speeded-Up Robust Features technique (SURF). The proposed technique embeds the binary secret message into the more robust characteristic regions in transform domain. Steganography synchronization is first achieved by the characteristic regions, which can be extracted using SURF technique, and then data embedding is achieved in a content based manner by modifying the wavelet transform coefficients. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm allows hiding data invisibly with an accurate retrieval in the presence of lossy compression. In addition, the scheme is robust to noise interference.