Abstract
Steganography is one of the most significant subdisciplines in the field of information concealment, which has proved successful in recent years. Numerous algorithms seemed to be focused on creating effective practical steganography systems. The study of steganography deals with concealing hidden information in various carrier media, such as images, audio, structured text, or video. The primary goal of this is to hide the presence of data itself. Here, we deal with steganography of images. This work presents image steganography techniques (both blind and non-blind) based on the chaotic system and the contourlet transform. The chaotic system is used for a number of reasons, the first of which is the use of a Modified Arnold Cat Map (MACM) to increase the key space, making it extremely difficult for the adversary to extract the secret message. This approach involves embedding in the Contourlet domain, which offers a huge embedding capacity. The proper embedding site is then carefully chosen to reduce the distortion on the cover picture and prevent this procedure from being detected. Experiments and comparative analyses demonstrated how well the suggested method produced stego pictures. Additionally, a comparison with a comparable wavelet-based steganography method demonstrates its superiority. PSNR, SNR, and correlation were used to gauge how similar the stego picture was to the cover image in order to determine the stego image's quality.