Comparative analysis of audio steganography methods

Information security has been one of the most important issues of all time for both individual and companies. Delivering data to the correct recipient is crucial for personal data protection, privacy of personal life and national security. To this end, different methods have been developed over the years to hide information from malicious individuals. Steganography is one of the most important information hiding method received great attention. In this study, five different audio steganography techniques are utilized and comparisons of these techniques are performed with experimental data. Using different embedding algorithms, 14 different messages ranging in length from 32 to 448 bits were placed in 20 audio files of 10 females and 10 males with the same frame size. Accordingly, fourteen different SNR values were obtained for each audio file used. Signal-to-noise ratios (SNR) computed between stego and cover audio files show that embedded message length, sum of amplitude values of the samples and frame size are the main factors that determine the quality. In addition, it was observed that there is no perceptual differences between the cover and stego audio recordings. Hence, the human auditory system is unable to determine whether an audio recording is authentic or conveys a hidden message. The spectrographic comparison of the cover and stego audio recordings show that hiding the secret message to an original audio signal highly affects the high-frequency region than the low-frequency components.