Introduction

Rationale

The ability to access and share information has become increasingly easy after the advancement of the Internet, since all information can be sent and accessed by a great number of people from all around the world. However, it is easy to detect and it is not possible to secure information, because someone may detect it by attaching a basic oscilloscope across the line. The employment of the oscilloscope enables to show if there is a signal, and a basic packet-sniffing program will inform what is going on. To cope with this secure information transfer, hiding a fact can be one of the alternatives to do because it enables to pass it off as something boring and ordinary so it does not arouse suspicion. By employing the data hiding, the information transferred can be more secure or undetectable. If the business rivals (let us say large organizations) want to intercept them sensitive information, they have to first capture transmissions, sort through target messages, and break any forms of encryption that can be applied to the messages. This process traditionally has been easy for large governments to do up to and possibly including the process of breaking the encryption on the message. In line with a data hiding issue, Anderson (1998) documents two reasons of the rapid growth of interest in information hiding. Firstly, the publishing and broadcasting industries have become interested in techniques for hiding encrypted copyright marks and serial numbers in digital films, audio recordings, books and multimedia products; an appreciation of new market opportunities created by digital distributions is coupled with a fear that digital works could be too easy to copy. Secondly, moves by various governments to restrict the availability of encryption services have motivated people to study methods by which private messages can be embedded in seemingly innocuous cover images. Referring to the explanation, the study of data hiding appears to be urgent.

Aims

Many data hiding techniques have been documented by many authors. The general agreement states that specific requirements of each data hiding technique vary with the application. There is no universal data hiding technique that satisfies all requirements of all applications. Consequently, each data hiding technique has to be designed within the context of the entire system in which it is to be used. Therefore, developing data hiding technique seems necessary to do. Based on the above considerations, the aim of this project is to design a data hiding technique by using Discrete Wavelet Transform. To measure the data hiding robustness, mean square error and digital image processing operations will be employed, specifying the data hiding within images using wavelet transform technique.