ASCII Strip-Based Novel Approach of Information Hiding in Frequency Domain

Image steganography is used for hiding secret information as well as for copyright protection. A new approach for information hiding or copyright protection is proposed in this paper based on frequency domain and ASCII strip. A new concept of ASCII strip has been used in this paper. ASCII strip can contain secret information or copyright information. This strip is used as a watermark image in the proposed method. In embedding process, firstly the ASCII strip is generated, then host image is ruptured into sub-bands using DWT. After that, DCT is applied to the chosen sub-band, and ASCII strip is embedded. In extraction process, firstly DWT is used to conquer the watermarked image in four sub-bands, then DCT is performed on chosen sub-band to retrieve the strip and then ASCII strip is converted to hidden text information. Experimental results show that combining DWT-DCT with ASCII strip improves the imperceptibility and robustness. It also gives promising results when it was compared with other similar techniques.