LWT based encrypted payload steganography

Steganography is used in covert communication for transportation of secrete information. In this paper we propose LWT based Encrypted Payload Steganography (LEPS). The payload is segmented into two parts say block 1 and block 2. The LWT is applied on block 2 to generate four sub bands. Payload block 1 is retained in the spatial domain itself. The values of approximation band coefficients of block 2 and spatial domain intensity values of block 1 are compressed. The LWT is applied on cover image to generate wavelet sub bands and considered only diagonal sub bands (XD). The XD band is decomposed into three parts. The key values are embedded into first part of XD band. The compressed payload is embedded in second and third blocks of XD adaptively. The payload can be retrieved at the destination by adapting reverse process of embedding. It is observed that the values of PSNR and capacity are better in the case of proposed algorithm compared to existing algorithm.