An image steganography algorithm based on PSO and IWT for underwater acoustic communication

• Published in: IEEE access Vol. 10; p. 1
• Main Authors: Wang, Wenjin, Li, Qingzhong
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Piscataway IEEE 2022; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Acoustics; Algorithms; Communication; Discrete wavelet transforms; Embedding; Error analysis; Error correction & detection; Error detection and recovery; Image quality; Image reconstruction; Image Steganography; Integer Wavelet Transform; Particle swarm optimization; Security; Steganography; Transmission error; Underwater acoustic communication; Underwater acoustics; Underwater communication; Wavelet transforms
• ISSN: 2169-3536; 2169-3536
• DOI: 10.1109/ACCESS.2022.3212691

To achieve fast and secure information steganography in underwater acoustic channel scenarios, this paper proposes a PSO (Particle Swarm Optimization) and IWT (integer wavelet transform) based image steganography algorithm for underwater acoustic communication. Firstly, the underwater image to be embedded is interleaved and packed to generate the secret information code-stream to improve the detection and recovery performance of transmission errors. Secondly, the cover image is divided into non-overlapping blocks and IWT is applied to each block, which can save PSO search space and improve the optimal solution performance. Thirdly, the embedding position matrix of the high frequency sub-band coefficients is chaotic scrambled, and PSO is used to select the optimal key to obtain the optimal matching position for the secret information to produce the best stego-image quality. Finally, transmission error detection and recovery measures are applied to the extracted secret information to improve the reconstruction quality in underwater acoustic channel scenarios. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms existing approaches in terms of information embedding capacity and steganographic visual quality, meeting the requirements of safety and real-time performance of underwater communication. Moreover, it also has the ability of error detection and recovery for harsh underwater acoustic channel.