Image Steganography Algorithm Suitable for HydroacousticCommunication

To realize high-speed and secure information steganography in hydroacoustic communication scenarios, an image steganography algorithm based on cuckoo search (CS) and integer wavelet transform under hydroacoustic communication is presented. At first, the underwater images to be embedded are interleaved and packed to generate the secret information stream to improve transmission error detection and recovery; then the cover image is partitioned into non-overlapped blocks, and the integer wavelet transform is implemented for each sub-block, in order to save CS search space and enhance the search performance of the algorithm; further, the embedding location matrix of high-frequency subband coefficients is chaotically dislocated, and the optimal matching location of the secret information is obtained by using CS to select the optimal key to generate the best quality stego image; finally, transmission error detection and recovery measures are applied to the extracted secret information to improve the reconstruction quality of underwater images after hydroacoustic transmission. Experimental results on the standard test image dataset SIPI show that the proposed algorithm achieves an average peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR) of 52.80 dB and an average structure similarity index measure of 0.9999 when the information embedding capacity is 0.5 bit per pixel, meeting the requirements of underwater communication security and real-time. Moreover, the PSNR of reconstructed images reaches over 35.9 dB when the packet loss rate is up to 20%, and over 36 dB at a mixed bit error rate of 0.8%, providing the ability to detect and recover from transmission errors under harsh underwater environment.