Lifting Wavelet Transform Based Data Steganography for Health Care and Military Applications

Steganography is the practice in which a message or information is hidden within another seemingly innocuous message or file, without anyone else being aware of its existence. Its importance lies in its ability to provide secure and covert communication between parties without raising suspicion from third parties who may be monitoring or intercepting the communication. Steganography has been used throughout history to transmit confidential information, such as military secrets or espionage, without being detected. In the modern era of digital technology, steganography is more important as the use of electronic communication has become widespread particularly in the healthcare sector for teleradiology applications. To securely transmit sensitive information like confidential patient data for teleradiology applications, we can apply steganography together with cryptography. For sensitive data transmission in military applications also, we can employ this method. In this work, AES encryption algorithm is applied to the confidential patient medical data and then it is embedded it into a cover image using Lifting wavelet transform and transferred through the cloud network. At the receiver side, the decrypted confidential data is extracted and we have compared the method using different wavelet transforms and the results obtained shows that haar and bs3 transforms have better PSNR and MSE values compared to other transforms.