Krishnakant Saboo

Audio to Image wavelet transform based audio Steganography


Guide: Prof. V. Gadre, IIT Bombay

Background

Steganograhy is the technique of hiding messages in a signal such that an unindended receiver of the signal doesn't come to know about the presence of the hidden message. Image steganography has been studied deeply by people. We study an application of concepts from image steganography to audio steganography.

Approach

The audio signal is converted to an image by taking the high frequency coefficients of the wavelet transform of the audio. A standard image steganography technique is applied to this image signal to hide the message in it. The image with the hidden message is then converted back to audio signal. A similar method is used for extracting the the message from the audio. This method gives us multiple parameters that could be used as a key during message extraction.

Long messages could be hidden into the audio without any perceptible change in it. We analysed the message reconstruction error as a function of the message length and concluded that even long messages could be securely transmitted and faithfully reconstructed.

Fig1: The 3-level wavelet transform of lena. The top left block represents the low frequency coefficients while the other blocks represent high frequency coefficients. The message is hidden the high frequency component so that changes in the spatial domain in the image are impreceptible.

Fig2: The PSNR of the reconstructed message with increasing message length. The change in audio is imperceptible for these cases and the reconstruction error is 0. However, on inceasing the bit length to 2000, a slight hum can be heard in the background.