Optimizing Image-Audio Fidelity in LSB-Based Data Concealment
摘要
Steganography, the art of concealing information within multimedia objects, is gaining more significance in applications for secure data transmission, digital watermarking, and privacy protection. This project addresses image-audio steganography, which is concealing audio information within an image to ensure data integrity and invisibility. The method involves the transformation of audio into an 8-bit binary form and embedding it within the least significant bits (LSB) of the red channel of the cover image. This process minimizes the perceptual effect, and the embedded image is visually imperceptible relative to the original. The measuring process uses Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR), Structural Similarity Index (SSIM), and Mean Squared Error (MSE) for visual similarity measurements, while Mel Cepstral Distortion (MCD), Short-Time Objective Intelligibility (STOI), and Cosine Similarity measure the extracted audio quality. Results indicate that this method achieves high-fidelity image and audio quality, being able to retain clarity, detail, and stealth suitable for secure multimedia steganography applications.