Design and implementation of lifting based wavelet and adaptive LSB steganography to secret data sharing through image on FPGA

Image steganography is an art of hiding images secretly within another image. There are several ways of performing image steganography; one among them is the spatial approach. The most popular spatial domain approach of image steganography is the Least Significant Bit (LSB) method, which hides the secret image pixel information in the LSB of the cover image pixel information. In this paper a LSB based steganography approach is used to design hardware architecture for the Image steganography. The Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) is used here to transform the cover image into higher and lower wavelet coefficients and use these coefficients in hiding the secret image. the design also includes encryption of secret image data, to provide a higher level of security to the secret image. The steganography system involving the stegno module and a decode module is designed here. The design was simulated, synthesized and implemented on Artix-7 FPGA. The operation hiding and retrieving images was successfully verified through simulations.