A Strong Encryption Method of Sound Steganography by Encoding an Image to Audio

The recently created technology of steganography entices a wide audience from the casual observer, to the scientific professional. Steganography is defined as the art and science of writing hidden messages in such a way that the hidden message is unnoticed by someone that is not aware of its content. This paper attempts to reveal new and current angles of steganography. When the hidden message is an image which is encoded into an audio file, the process is termed as Sound Steganography. In this work, we have designed a practically secure sound steganographic method, an algorithm which could encode a picture into sound and then read it again in order to obtain image through sound. The algorithm used is simple and optimal, named the color palette substitution. Sound steganography is implemented in two stages, namely image cryptography, where the image is encoded to sound, being the first and reading the sound in a frequency spectrum, being the second. Also the image converted audio is embedded over another music file to form a stronger encryption. MATLAB 7.0.1 with image processing and signal processing toolboxes is used as the development tool for implementing the algorithm.