A Robust Technique for Steganography of Enhanced Audio Signals
Marwa A. Nasr, Walid El‐Shafai, El‐Sayed M. El‐Rabaie, Adel S. El‐Fishawy, Moawad Ibrahim Dessouky, Nariman Abdel-Salam, Fathi E. Abd El‐Samie · 2023
Audio steganography is a tool for concealing data (a secret message) inside an audio signal (a carrier). It is regarded as an essential approach for information security. This paper presents a proposed technique for audio signal steganography, which is implemented in the wavelet domain, with a pre-processing enhancement step. First, adaptive Wiener filtering is implemented to reduce the noise on audio signals. Then, the Inverse Short-Time Fourier Transform (ISTFT) is applied to convert the target image from the spectrogram-like nature to the 1-D signal-like nature. The embedding process is performed on high-frequency coefficients in the wavelet domain to keep the audio signals unchanged for human perception. The reverse process is implemented at the receiver. Hence, the embedded coefficients are extracted to recover the embedded image through Short-Time Fourier Transform (STFT). The recovered audio signal is also obtained after the removal of embedded coefficients. The major goal is to enhance the performance of the audio steganography technique, while retaining the audio signal quality. The outcomes show that the suggested technique successfully allows audio steganography and enhances the resultant audio signal quality at different Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) levels.