A steganographic approach for secure communication of medical images based on the DCT-SVD and the compressed sensing (CS) theory

In this paper, a hybrid approach based on cryptography and steganography is proposed for the security of medical image over an open communication channel. In this approach, medical image information is embedded using discrete cosine transform (DCT)-singular value decomposition (SVD)-based embedding process. The medical image is encrypted using CS encryption before embedding into the standard image. This encrypted medical image is inserted into the singular values of DCT coefficients of the standard image to get the stego image. The experimental results show that the encrypted medical image is successfully extracted from the stego image under various image processing attacks at recovering side. The result analysis also shows improved imperceptibility of the stego image with a peak signal-to-noise ratio value above 60 dB for all types of medical images under consideration. Furthermore, the computation time of proposed approach is less than that of existing approaches.