A Novel Secure Steganographic Method Based on Zero Tree Method

Abstract

A secure steganographic method is proposed for embedding secret messages into gray scale images in frequency domain based on partitioning approach. The cover image is divided into 8×8 non-overlapping blocks and integer wavelet transform through lifting scheme is performed for each block. In order to find proper location for embedding secret message, the zero tree method is applied to each block. The lossless data compression encoding applied to secret message to obtain high secrecy, high payload and authentication. Secret message embedded in cover image without degrading the quality of the original image. Simulation result reveals that, the proposed method has achieved better performance in terms of high data embedding payload, high imperceptibility of stego-image and secure against statistical attack compared with existing methods.