Color image steganography scheme using set partitioning in hierarchical trees coding, digital Fourier transform and adaptive phase modulation

In this research of color image hidden scheme, we aim to conceal a secret image into the cover image of the same size without noticeable degradation. In our approach, discrete wavelet transform (DWT) and set partitioning in hierarchical trees (SPIHT) codec are used to obtain a low bit rate and high reconstructed quality image compression. In the embedding process, an adaptive phase modulation (APM) mechanism and discrete Fourier transform (DFT) were adopted for secret data embedding. Simultaneously, nearest phase modulations (NPM) was used to improve the imperceptibility and decrease degradation of cover image. Both the chaotic mechanism (CM) and frequency hopping (FH) structure were hired to enhance the security of the scheme. Comparing with other data-hiding techniques, our proposed method has three advantages. (A) The extracted secret image has high quality reconstruction by using SPIHT coder. (B) The stego-image possesses excellent imperceptibility without noticeable degradation because secret data was concealed in the phase by using APM and NPM. (C) Have very large embedding capacity, it allows the size of secret image to be the same as the cover image.