Secure and Imperceptible Image Steganography in Discrete Wavelet Transform Using the XOR Logical Function and Genetic Algorithm

A steganography system must embed the message in an unseen and unrecognizable manner in the cover signal. Embedding information in transform coefficients, especially Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT), is one of the most successful approaches in this field. The proposed method in this paper has two main steps. In the first step, the XOR logical function was used to embed two bits of data in the adjacent DWT coefficient pair. No change in the coefficients will occur if the XOR result of the two bits of low-value data of the two adjacent coefficients is identical to the two bits of secret data. Otherwise, one or both of the coefficient(s) will need a one-unit increase or decrease. In the second step, the genetic algorithm was used to select, between the two possible solutions, a new value for the adjacent coefficient pair that needs to be changed. Using the genetic algorithm, the selections were made such that the generated stego image experienced the least change relative to the cover image. The results of comparing this method with the existing methods in low- and high-level embedding showed that the proposed method was successful in producing stego images with high-quality criteria. In addition, the SPAM steganalysis method did not show high accuracy in its detection. One of the benefits of the proposed method is the need for a short key to embed and extract the secret message. This issue increases the security and feasibility of the proposed method.