Authentication of secret information in image Steganography

In recent years, steganography and steganalysis are two important areas of research that involve a number of applications. These two areas of research are important especially when reliable and secure information exchange is required. Steganography is an art of embedding information in a cover image without causing statistically significant variations to the cover image. Steganalysis is the technology that attempts to defeat steganography by detecting the hidden information and extracting. In this paper we propose an image steganography that can verify the reliability of the information being transmitted to the receiver. The method can verify whether the attacker has tried to edit, delete or forge the secret information in the stego-image. The technique embeds the hidden information in the spatial domain of the cover image and uses two special AC coefficients of the discrete wavelet transform domain to verify the veracity (integrity) of the secret information from the stego image. The analysis shows that the BER and PSNR is improved in the case of DWT than DCT.