Performance comparison of DCT and Walsh transform for steganography

Abstract

In this paper we are introducing the concept of embedding secret message in Transform domain using low energy components using DCT and Walsh Transform. This results in less perceptible error in the stego image. The low energy components are spread over the transform domain that gives high security to the embedded message. The study is carried out for different thresholds for selecting low energy coefficients. It is observed that larger threshold value results in perceptible error in the stego image. A threshold value of 50 gives very good results so that the error in stego image is imperceptible. This also results in much higher embedding capacity then choosing the conventional middle ordered frequency elements.