A Quantum-Inspired Approach for audio hiding in Images via Frequency Domain representation of image channel

Steganography, throughout history, is the science of concealing secret information. This art ambuscade in hiding a message into a cover data. This data can be seen by unauthorized observers, and they cannot recognize that there is something strange. With no doubt, the data could be image, audio, or video. There is a shortage of research in the arena of quantum steganography, especially, audio in image steganography. Reading the upcoming era of quantum computing, doors are open for innovation. This paper doesn’t apply quantum libraries directly, but it simulates quantum concepts such as superposition, using Hadamard gate, and entanglement, using control phase gate. This is implemented using classical methods. That is, this paper introduces “quantum-inspired” approach for audio in image steganography. As secret information is subject to sever changes while embedding, like any steganography project, it is important to preserve the robustness of the cover image, and ensure high imperceptibility. This is achieved in this paper. This paper has chosen 60 high resolution images from Div2K dataset, and tested the proposed approach on them. Each image has its own evaluation metrics. Thirty four of them have PSNR greater than 40%, MSE near zero, and SSIM and VIF near one. One of the promising results from the thirty four images is PSNR, MSE, VIF, and SSIM are 61.52 dB, 0.0458, 0.997, and 0.9995, respectively for a specified image. Those results are impressive. Despite the successfulness of this “quantum-inspired” approach, it has constraints regarding the image.