International Journal of Advanced Engineering Research and Technology (IJAERT) 4

Volume 3 Issue 1, January 2015, ISSN No.: 2348 8190

A Technique Steganography for Hiding Secret Information and its Application

Jayshri Dnyaneshwar Pande1, Dr. Trapti Arjeria2
Bhabha Engineering Research Institute Bhopal,Computer Science Engineering,
2
Bhabha Engineering Research Institute Bhopal, Computer Science Engineering
1

ABSTRACT

II. AUDIO STEGANOGRAPHY

In this paper we have represented the technique

steganography for hiding secret information. We have
presented a high capacity and high stego-signal quality
audio steganography scheme based on samples
comparison in DWT domain where selected coefficient
of a segment are compared with pre determined
threshold value T and based on comparison bits are
embedded. The strength of our algorithm is depend on
the segment size and their strength are enabled the
algorithm to achieve very high embedding capacity for
different data type that can reach up to 25% from the
input audio file size with lest of 35 dB SNR for the
output stego signal. The proposed algorithm was
implemented by using Matlab (2009a) programming
Keywords Steganography, audio, data hiding, coding,
matlab.

I. INTRODUCTION
Steganography is an art and a science of communicating
in a way, which hides the existence of the
communication. It is also called as covered writing,
because it uses a cover of a message for sending any
important secret message [3]. Steganography serves as a
means for private, secure and sometimes malicious
communication. Steganography is the art to hide the
very presence of communication by embedding the
secret message into the innocuous looking cover media
objects, such as images using the human's visual, aural
redundance or media objects' statistical redundance.
Steganography is a powerful tool which increases
security in data transferring and archiving. In the
steganographic scenario, the secret data is first concealed
within another object which is called cover object, to
form stego object and then this new object can be
transmitted or saved. Using different techniques, we can
send secret data in the form of an image, a music file or
even a video file by embedding it into the carrier,
forming a stego signal. At the receivers end, the secret
data can be recovered from the stego signal using
different algorithms [3].

In a computer-based audio steganography system,

secret messages are embedded in digital sound. The
secret message is embedded by slightly altering the
binary sequence of a sound file. Existing audio
steganography software can embed messages in WAV,
AU, and even MP3 sound files. Embedding secret
messages in digital sound is usually a more difficult
process than embedding messages in other media, such
as digital images. In order to conceal secret messages
successfully, a variety of methods for embedding
information in digital audio have been introduced [17].
LSB Encoding: Sampling technique followed by
Quantization converts analog audio signal to digital
binary sequence. In this technique LSB of binary
sequence of each sample of digitized audio file is
replaced with binary equivalent of secret message.
Parity Coding: Instead of breaking a signal down into
individual samples, the parity coding method breaks a
signal down into separate regions of samples and
encodes each bit from the secret message in a sample
regions parity bit.
Phase coding: Human Auditory System (HAS) cant
recognize the phase change in audio signal as easy it can
recognize noise in the signal.
Spread spectrum: In the context of audio steganography,
the basic spread spectrum (SS) method attempts to
spread secret information across the audio signals
frequency spectrum as much as possible.
Echo Hiding: In echo hiding, information is embedded
in a sound file by introducing an echo into the discrete
signal.

III.
AUDIO
TECHNIQUES

STEGANOGRAPHY

A. An Overview:

An audio steganography technique can be classified

into two groups based on the domain of operation. One
type is time domain technique and the other is
transformation based method. The time domain
techniques include methods where the embedding is
performed without any transformation. Steganography is
employed on the original samples of the audio signal.

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International Journal of Advanced Engineering Research and Technology (IJAERT) 5

Volume 3 Issue 1, January 2015, ISSN No.: 2348 8190

One of the examples of time domain steganography

technique is the least significant bit (LSB) method. In
LSB method the watermark is embedded into the least
significant bits of the host signal. As against these
techniques, the transformation based steganography
methods perform steganography in the transformation
domain. Few transformation techniques that can be used
are discrete cosine transform and discrete wavelet
transform. In transformation based approaches the
embedding is done on the samples of the host signal
after they are transformed. Using of transformation
based techniques provides additional information about
the signal. In general, the time domain techniques
provide least robustness as a simple low pass filtering
can remove the watermark. Hence time domain
techniques are not advisable for the applications such as
copyright protection and airline traffic monitoring;
however, it can be used in applications like proving
ownership and medical applications [20].
B. LSB coding:
Least significant bit (LSB) coding is the simplest way
to embed information in a digital audio file. By
substituting the least significant bit of each sampling
point with a binary message, LSB coding allows for a
large amount of data to be encoded. The following
diagram illustrates how the message 'HEY' is encoded in
a 16-bit CD quality sample using the LSB method [10]:

coding relies on the fact that the phase components of

sound are not as perceptible to the human ear as noise is.
Rather than introducing perturbations, the technique
encodes the message bits as phase shifts in the phase
spectrum of a digital signal, achieving an inaudible
encoding in terms of signal-to-perceived noise ratio. The
phase coding method breaks down the sound file into a
series of N segments. A Discrete Fourier Transform
(DFT) is applied to each segment to create a matrix of
the phase and magnitude. The phase difference between
each segment is calculated, the first segment (s0) has an
artificial absolute phase of p0 created, and all other
segments have newly created phase frames.

Figure 2 Phase shift coding

The new phase and original magnitude are combined
to get the new segment, Sn. These new segments are
then concatenated to create the encoded output and the
frequency remains preserved. In order to decode the
hidden information the receiver must know the length of
the segments and the data interval used. The first
segment is detected as a 0 or a 1 and this indicates where
the message starts.
D. Echo Hiding:

Figure 1 Example of LSB coding

C. Phase Coding:

Phase coding addresses the disadvantages of the

noise-inducing methods of audio Steganography. Phase

Echo hiding embeds its data by creating an echo to the

source audio. Three parameters of this artificial echo are
used to hide the embedded data, the delay, the decay rate
and the initial amplitude. As the delay between the
original source audio and the echo decrease it becomes
harder for the human ear to distinguish between the two
signals until eventually a created carrier sounds echo is
just heard as extra resonance.
In addition, offset is varied to represent the binary
message to be encoded. One offset value represents a
binary one, and a second offset value represents a binary
zero. If only one echo was produced from the original
signal, only one bit of information could be encoded.
Therefore, the original signal is broken down into blocks
before the encoding process begins. Once the encoding

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International Journal of Advanced Engineering Research and Technology (IJAERT) 6

Volume 3 Issue 1, January 2015, ISSN No.: 2348 8190

process is completed, the blocks are concatenated back

together to create the final signal.

The embedding process is divided into the individual

blocks such as encryption,
Segmentation wavelet
decomposition, frames selection, watermark embedding
and reconstruction as shown in Figure 4

Audio Cover
Signal

Segmentation

Wavelet
Decomposition

Coefficient
Selection

Message
Embedding

Reconstruction

Audio Stego
Signal

Figure 3 Example of Echo hiding

The "one" echo signal is then multiplied by the "one"
mixer signal and the "zero" echo signal is multiplied by
the "zero" mixer signal. Then the two results are added
together to get the final signal. The final signal is less
abrupt than the one obtained using the first echo hiding
implementation. This is because the two mixer echoes
are complements of each other and that ramp transitions
are used within each signal. These two characteristics of
the mixer signals produce smoother transitions between
echoes.

IV. PROPOSED METHODOLOGY

In the proposed method the carrier file is taken as
audio format and the secret message may be a text or
audio format files. Our system provides a very friendly
User Interface where the user had to specify just the
required inputs (audio, text).After embedding or
extracting the user can save /open or just discord the
output of that particular operation according to their
wish. In view of providing security by preventing
unauthorized person to access the software password
facility is provided to the user in order to work with the
software. To provide more security by avoiding an
intruder to extract the embedded data a security key is
used while embedding and extracting message.
There are two methods in Audio steganography
1) Embedding
2) Extracting
Embedding is a process of hiding the message in the
audio.
Extracting is a process of retrieving the message from
the audio.
EMBEDDING ALGORITHM

Secret
Message

Encryption

Figure 4 the General Structure of the Proposed hiding

Scheme
Input secret message and cover signal: Proposed method
starts by inputting the secret message which is to be
embedding into signal. The secret message can be any
text file or image or any audio wave file .and then
inputting the cover signal in which data is to be
embedded. This cover signal must be sufficient large to
cover the message.
After selection of input secret message and cover
signal next, we find out the length of the audio file as
well as length of the text file. Check whether the size of
the audio file is greater or less than the text file. If the
size of the audio file is less than the size of the selected
text file then print the error message, otherwise it is
possible to embed the text file into selected audio file.
Encryption: Before hiding the secret message into cover
signal it must be converted into the other form so that it
cant be interpretable by intruder .to do so first, we
convert the secret data or message into its binary form
.let suppose the length of message is N bits long, Next
use the random number to generate the private key of
length same as the length of message because the size of
encrypt message is equal to the original message, then
apply X-OR operator to generate the cipher message of
length N bits.
Cover Signal Segmentation: Let the input cover signal
consist of R samples, this signal is segmented into two
catagories:

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International Journal of Advanced Engineering Research and Technology (IJAERT) 7

Volume 3 Issue 1, January 2015, ISSN No.: 2348 8190

1. Processed samples
2. Unprocessed samples.
The size of processed samples is depending on the size
of message bits. If the size of message bit is N then The
Processed samples are consist of N*2^L samples. Where
L is decomposition level. the rest samples is called
unprocessed samples, Next the processed part is
partitioned into segments of size same as size of
message bits that is N segments; each segment has
length of Z samples.
EXRACTING ALGORITHM
The extraction process is illustrated in Figure 5. The
extraction process is divided into blocks stego
segmentation,
wave
decomposition,
Coefficient
selection, Message extraction and reverse encryption.
The Quantization parameter Q needs to be the same that
is used during encryption.

Audio Stego
Signal

Segmentation

Wavelet
Decomposition

Coefficient
Selection

Message
Extraction

Reverse
Encryption

Secret
Message

Secret Message Recovery Stage: Secret message

recovery stage is very simple and based on comparison
of selected detailed coefficient with threshold value T .
If the coefficient is greater then or equal to threshold T it
means that Message bit is 1 otherwise the Message bit is
0
if(Segment(i,p)>=T)
Message(i)=1;
elseif(Segment(i,p)<T)
Message(i)=0;
else
error("there is problem in Stegno Signal");
end
Reverse Encryption: Before delivery of the secret
message to receiver , it must be converted back to its
original form .to do so first, we use the same random
number to generate the private key of length same as the
length of message, then apply X-OR operator to get the
original message of length N bits. Next we convert
message of its binary form to text format .and then
deliver to the receiver.

V. RESULT AND ANALYSIS

Figure 5 Block diagram of the Message
Recovery Algorithm
Input Audio stego signal: In the message recovery
algorithm, first we select the Audio stego signal from
which data is to be extracted.
Stegno Signal Segmentation: Again, the stego signal is
segmented into two categories: 1.
Processed
samples
2. Unprocessed samples.
The size of Processed segment is known to receiver with
the help of size of message bit .it is calculate by
multiplying the size of message bits with 2^L where L is
the decomposition level. Next the Processed part is
segmented again into N segments; each segment has
length of Z samples.
Stego Segment Decomposition and coefficient selection:
Again, each segment of the Stego audio signal is
decomposed using L level of Haar DWT to obtain 2^L
signals, each one of the produced signal has length of
Z/2^L samples. One represents the Approximated signal
and the others represent detailed signals. From the
detailed signal we select same detail signal that was
selected on the time of hiding stage for embedding
process

Performance Parameter: In this section we give brief

descriptions of the performance parameters used. The
performance parameters used for the performance are bit
error rate (BER) and signal to noise ratio (SNR)
discussed below.
The original signal (the cover
document) is denoted x(i), i 1,..N while the
distorted
signal
(the
stego-document)
as

y(i), i 1,..N .

In some cases the distortion is

calculated from the overall data . However most of the
case, the distortion is calculated for small segments and
by averaging these, the overall measure is obtained.
Bit Error Rate: Bit error rate can be defined as the
percentage of bits corrupted in the transmission of digital
information due to the effects of noise, interference and
distortion. For example, the bits to be transmitted are
11001100 and the received bits are 10000100.
Comparing the number of bits transmitted to received,
two bits are affected by transmission. Hence, the BER in
this example is 2/8*100 = 25%.
Generally the BER of a signal is computed using
equation below.
BER=NW/NS*100
Where, Nw is the number of error bits and NS refers to
the No of Secret bits

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International Journal of Advanced Engineering Research and Technology (IJAERT) 8

Volume 3 Issue 1, January 2015, ISSN No.: 2348 8190

Signal-to-Noise Ratio: SNRseg is defined as the average

of the SNR values over short segments:

10
SNRseg
M

M 1

log
m 0

Nm N 1

10

i Nm

x 2 (i )

x(i ) y (i ) 2

where x(i) is the original audio signal, y(i) is the

distorted audio signal. The length of segments is
typically 15 to 20 ms for speech. The SNRseg is applied
for frames which have energy above a specified
threshold in order to avoid silence regions. Signal-toNoise Ratio (SNR), is a special case of SNRseg, when
M=1 and one segment encompasses the whole record
[18]. The SNR is very sensitive to the time alignment of
the original and distorted audio signal. The SNR is
measured as
N

SNR 10 log 10

(i )

i 1

x(i) y (i)

i 1

Here N represents the number of samples in both signals.

Experiment Setup: All algorithms, including proposed
technique, are implemented on Windows PC having
Intel 2.4 GHz processor and 2GB RAM, and run using
Matlab 9a. We have considered three different audio
files in this experiment to embed digital data. One of the
audio file is adios sound and is a 8 bit mono audio signal
sampled at 11.25 kHz. We applied Haar wavelets on
cover signal and choose the coefficient where the data is
to be hide using a pre determined threshold value T. The
performance of the embedded information is studied by
applying attacks such as re-quantization, re-sampling,
low-pass filtering, high-pass filtering, AWGN, MP3
compression, jittering and cropping.
For the complete analysis of the proposed technique
different audio signals are considered such as the adios,
aaaaagh, and shutdwn track namely a.wav,b.wav and
c.wav respectively. Figure 6 shows the time domain
response of these signals. Care has been taken to study
the complete performance of the algorithm by collecting
diverge audio signals as shown in Figure 6. Same attacks
are employed on all audio signals.

Figure 6 Time domain response of the considered audio

signals
Performance Analysis: Fig.7 shows the relationship
between SNR and embedding capacity for fixed message
type and three different cover signals.

SNR V/S Data Rate

55
50

SNR(db)

a.wav

45

b.wav

40
0.5 1.5 2.5 3.5

c.wav

Data Rate(KBPS)

Figure 7 The Relationship between SNR and Embedding

Capacity for Different Cover Signals and different Data
Type
The performance of the proposed algorithm against the
signal processing and desynchronized attacks such as the
addition of Gaussian noise is evaluated. The wavelet
filter used for the analysis is Hear wavelet with level 3
decomposition and the SNR of the stego signal is 34 dB
and T= 0.01. The data taken is a text file with 3kb size.

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International Journal of Advanced Engineering Research and Technology (IJAERT) 9

Volume 3 Issue 1, January 2015, ISSN No.: 2348 8190

From the observation, for SNR value of 25 dB and

above the embedded data is inaudible to the human ear.
In addition to that, the BER of the extracted data is
nearly 1 and 0 for majority of the attacks.

SNR in (db)

40
39
38
37
36
35
34
33
32
31
db 30
29
28
27
26
25
24
23
22
21
20

Table 1 Performance evaluation of the embedded data

with respect to AWGN and BER
Cover Signal

a.wav

AWGN (DB)

BER

35

54.34

30

48.65

34.65
33.45
33.43 28.56
28.32
27.65

0.01

b.wav

c.wav

25

44.56

35

52.43

30

50.56

25

48.42

35

53.65

30

48.32

25

46.55

0.02

a.wav
25.92
25.56
25.16

b.wav
c.wav

0.03

Value
of Pfor
and
Q
Figure 8 Comparison
graph
different
cover signals
with respect to SNR on different Threshold T
Fig 9 shows a comparison graph of different cover signal
with respect to Processing Time on different values of T
for fixed capacity ( about 200 word/sec) and Z = 8
samples. The comparison showed the clearly superiority
of the proposed scheme over the conventional DWT
scheme in high embedded capacity, the SNR is above 25
dB in our algorithm while it is in range of 21 dB in
conventional DWT scheme for different data type
message
Processing Time
3

2.86
2.72
2.5
2.45 2.54 2.372.28
2.24
2
Second 2.11
2.15
1.5

Table 1 shows a comparison of different cover signal

with respect to SNR on different values of Threshold T
and processing time for fixed capacity ( about 200
word/sec) and Z = 8 samples. In these tests we use adios,
aaaaagh, and shutdwn wave file as a cover signals with
length of 35900 samples 63450 and 79099 respectively
and text file as a secret message with size of 3kb. The
results in table shows that using the threshold value T
equal to 0.1 for comparison will increase the SNR. The
arbitrary result of bits block matching make the
distribution of secret message blocks over the cover
signals arbitrary and that increase the security of secret
message.

Figure 9 Comparison graph for different cover signals

with respect to Processing Time on different value of T

Fig 8 shows a comparison graph of different cover signal

with respect to SNR on different values of T and
processing time for fixed capacity ( about 200 word/sec)
and Z = 8 samples. The comparison showed the clearly
superiority of the proposed scheme over the
conventional DWT scheme in high embedded capacity,
the SNR is above 25 dB in our algorithm while it is in
range of 21 dB in conventional DWT scheme for
different data type messages.

Steganography is an information hiding technique where

secret message is embedded into unsuspicious cover
signal. An effective audio steganographic scheme should
possess the following three characteristics: Inaudibility
of distortion (Perceptual Transparency), Data Rate
(Capacity) and Robustness. These characteristics
(requirements) are called the magic triangle for data
hiding.

a.wav

b.wav

1
(4,5) (3,6) (2,7)

c.wav

Value of P and Q

VI. CONCLUSION

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International Journal of Advanced Engineering Research and Technology (IJAERT) 10

Volume 3 Issue 1, January 2015, ISSN No.: 2348 8190

We have presented a high capacity and high stego-signal

quality audio steganography scheme based on samples
comparison in DWT domain where selected coefficient
of a segment are compared with pre determined
threshold value T and based on comparison bits are
embedded. The strength of our algorithm is depend on
the segment size and their strength are enabled the
algorithm to achieve very high embedding capacity for
different data type that can reach up to 25% from the
input audio file size with lest of 35 dB SNR for the
output stego signal.
The proposed algorithm was implemented by using
Matlab (2009a) programming. The proposed algorithm
was tested using three audio cover signals: adios,
aaaaagh, and shutdwn wave file called a.wav , b.wav
and c.wav respectively. Each signal has resolution of 8
bits per sample and sampling frequency 11025
samples/sec and text are used in tests as secret messages.
The quality of output signal in each test was computed
using SNR.
Disadvantages associated with this proposed system are
a low data transmission rate due to the fact that the each
bit of secret message is embedded into one segment and
size of segment is approx 4 to 16 samples. It means that
utilization of samples is very poor. As a result, this
method can be used when only a small amount of data
needs to be concealed. Otherwise this can be proved as a
good method for audio Steganography.
In future we will modify and improve this technique so
that more data can be embedded into cover signal.

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