High-fidelity steganography in EEG signals using advanced transform-based methods

The increasing prevalence of digital health solutions and smart health devices (SHDs) ensures the continuity of personal biometric data while simultaneously raising concerns about their security and privacy. Consequently, the development of novel encryption techniques and data protection policies is crucial to comply with regulations such as The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and to safeguard against cyber threats. This study introduces a robust and efficient method for embedding private information into electroencephalogram (EEG) signals by employing the stationary wavelet transform (SWT), singular value decomposition (SVD), and tent map techniques. The proposed approach aims to increase embedding capacity while maintaining signal integrity, ensuring resilience against various forms of distortion, and achieving computational efficiency. Experiments were conducted on three publicly available EEG datasets (Graz A, DEAP, and Bonn), and performance was evaluated using widely recognized metrics, including peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), structural similarity index (SSIM), percentage root mean square difference (PRD), normalized cross-correlation (NCC), bit error rate (BER), and Euclidean distance (ED). The results indicate that the method preserves perceptual quality, achieving PSNR values above 60 dB and demonstrating minimal signal distortion. Robustness tests involving noise addition, random cropping, and low-pass filtering confirm the method's high resilience, with BER approaching zero and NCC near unity. Moreover, the proposed method demonstrates significantly reduced hiding and extraction times compared to conventional approaches, enhancing its suitability for real-time, secure biomedical data transmission.