High Capacity Secure Image Steganography Based on Contourlet Transform

Abstract

In this paper we propose an image steganography technique which embeds secret data without making explicit modifications to the image. The proposed method simultaneously provides both imperceptibility and undetectability. We decompose image by contourlet transform and determine nonsmooth regions. Embedding data in these regions cause less degradation in image quality. Contourlet sub-bands are divided into 3×3 blocks. Central coefficient of each block is considered for embedding if they belong to edgy regions. Experiments show that this method can achieve high embedding capacity while remains undetectable by Farid`s universal steganalysis technique.