Efficient image steganography method using contourlet transform and geometric-based pixel encryption for enhanced...

Area of Science:

• Information Security
• Digital Image Processing
• Cryptography

Background:

• Multimedia content transmission necessitates robust information security measures.
• Information security relies on content hiding (steganography) and cryptography.
• Existing methods require enhancement for secure multimedia communication.

Purpose of the Study:

• To propose a novel, double-layer encryption-based steganography technique for secure image embedding.
• To enhance the confidentiality and integrity of secret images during transmission.
• To achieve high imperceptibility and robustness against various security attacks.

Main Methods:

• Secret images are encrypted using Geometric Mean (Arithmetic, Harmonic, Geometric Progressions).
• Embedding is performed using Contourlet Transform (CT) for visual quality.
• A Laplacian Pyramidal Directional Filter Bank (LPDFB) is utilized for contour extraction.

Main Results:

• The technique demonstrated robustness against noise, compression, rotation, and cropping attacks.
• Achieved high performance metrics: 45.5 dB PSNR, 0.9837 SSIM, 0.0020 BER, 0.9951 NCC.
• The stego images maintained high quality and security against steganalysis.

Conclusions:

• The proposed steganography method offers a robust solution for secure image embedding.
• The double-layer encryption significantly improves data confidentiality and integrity.
• The technique outperforms existing methods in terms of security and imperceptibility.