Steganography using Cuckoo Optimized Wavelet Coefficients

Secret data hiding has become center of information security research with the enormous growth of the internet. Many researchers are actively working towards increasing the capacity of hidden content, i.e., hiding bigger data/message in a cover without being perceivable. This paper proposes to use Cuckoo optimized algorithm for finding best coefficients in the Wavelet Transform domain of an image for embedding secret data to obtain stego image. Huffman encoding is applied on secret data to give encoded bit stream which is embedded in sub bands obtained from wavelet transform of the cover to form stego object. Huffman coding has characteristics of lossless compression which can be used to increase embedding capacity. The algorithm is implemented in Matlab and results are compared with existing LSB steganography and steganography using PSO in wavelet domain in terms of PSNR and SSIM.