A coverless image steganography based on robust image wavelet hashing

Abstract

Since the concept of coverless information hiding was proposed, it has been greatly developed due to its effectiveness of resisting the steganographic tools. In this paper, a new coverless steganography is presented to hide the secret data in a more secure way and to enhance the robustness against attacks. This method depends on frequency domain. The embedding process consists of several steps. Firstly, the secret data is divided into no overlapping segments. Secondly, a set of images is collected to find appropriate images to be stego images. Thirdly, to build a hash sequence for an image, a powerful hashing algorithm is used. Fourthly, for each image hash sequence, the inverted index structure is created. Fifthly, choose the image which its hash equivalent to the secret data segment. Several tests are done to measure the robustness of the proposed method. The results of the experiments reveal that the proposed strategy is resistant to a variety of image processing attacks such as joint photographic experts group (JPEG) compression, noise, low pass filtering, scaling, rotation and median and mean filter, brightness, and sharpening.