Image Steganography using IWT along with AES Encryption

Steganography is a process that involves hiding a secret message in an appropriate carrier like image, audio, video or text in such a way that secret message does not attract attention to itself and remains invisible. Cryptography is an art of protecting information by transforming it into an unreadable format called Cipher text only those possessing a secret key can decipher the message into plain text. A combined approach using Image Steganography and Privatekey Cryptography has been proposed, the cover image is transformed using Integer Wavelet Transform (IWT) and plain text (secret message) is encrypted using Advanced Encrypted Standards (AES). The Encrypted text is then embedded into cover image using proposed assignment algorithm. This system will offer higher security and robustness against image processing attacks and low-pass filtering attacks compared to older system with good embedding capacity, also the stego image and the secret message will have good visual quality. The system will have improved results in terms of PSNR and MSE values.