High-capacity steganography through audio fusion and fission

Abstract

Information security is required for two reasons, either to conceal the information completely or to prevent the misuse of the information by adding watermarks or metadata. Audio steganography uses audio signals to hide secret information. In the proposed audio steganography technique, cover audio files and secret audio files are transformed from time domain to wavelet domain using discrete wavelet transform, the secret audio file is transformed in two levels, leading to secure and high-capacity data hiding. 1% of the 2-level compressed secret is fused to 99% of the 1-level compressed cover. “Peak signal to noise ratio and mean squared error, Pearson’s correlation coefficient, spearman’s correlation coefficient, perceptual evaluation of speech quality and short-time objective intelligibility” are considered to assess the similarity of cover audio and stego audio and similarity of secret audio embedded, and secret audio retrieved. Results show that the stego audio signal is perceptually indistinguishable from the cover audio signal. The approach also passed the robustness test.