Using contourlet transform and cover selection for secure steganography

In this paper, we present a new adaptive contourlet-based steganography method that hides secret data in a specific or automatically selected cover image. Our proposed steganography method primarily decomposes the cover image by contourlet transform. Then, every bit of secret data is embedded by increasing or decreasing the value of one coefficient in a block of a contourlet subband. Contourlet coefficients are manipulated relative to their magnitudes to hide the secret data adaptively. In addition to proposing contourlet-based steganography method, this work investigates the effect of cover selection on steganography embedding and steganalysis results. We demonstrate, through the experiments, that choosing suitable cover image by a proper selection measure could help the steganographer reduce detectability of stego images. The proposed technique is examined with some state-of-the-art steganalysis methods, and the results illustrate that an image can successfully hide secret data with average embedding capacity of 0.02 bits per pixel in a random selected cover image. Cover selection improves the embedding capacity up to 0.06 bits per pixel. Several experiments and comparative studies are performed to show the effectiveness of the proposed technique in enhancing the security of stego images, as well as to demonstrate its gain over the previous approaches in literature.