🎓 Capstone Project: Multimedia Steganography System

🧠 A complete suite for hiding and extracting information in Images, Audio, Video, and PDF files
🕵️‍♂️ Combines classical steganography with modern techniques in an interactive, user-friendly interface
👨‍💻 Developed as an academic final-year capstone project

---

🧩 Project Overview

This project explores the field of Multimedia Steganography, which is the art of hiding information in plain sight — inside digital media like images, videos, audio, and documents — such that only the intended recipient can detect and extract it.

Implemented using Python and web technologies, this system provides a full pipeline to:

• 📥 Encode secret messages or files into media
• 📤 Decode hidden content from stego-media
• 🖼️ Visualize or listen to the results
• 🌐 Use via a browser-based frontend or notebook backend

---

🎯 Steganography Techniques Implemented

🖼️ Image Steganography

• Embeds secret messages or images into cover images using Least Significant Bit (LSB) encoding
• Also supports DCT (Discrete Cosine Transform) and DWT (Discrete Wavelet Transform) based steganography techniques
• Supports color images (RGB) for larger embedding capacity

🔊 Audio Steganography

• Hides secret messages within audio files (e.g., .wav)
• Leverages LSB embedding in sound wave samples

🎥 Video Steganography

• Extracts frames from a video
• Applies image steganography frame-by-frame
• Reconstructs video from modified frames

📄 PDF Steganography (Whitespace)

• Hides binary messages using:
  • ' ' (space) → 0
  • \t (tab) → 1
• Stealth encoding invisible to the reader

---

🌐 Frontend UI

The included steganography-frontend.html provides a simple yet powerful interface:

• Select media type (Image, Audio, Video, PDF)
• Input the secret message
• Choose cover media and output location
• Trigger encoding or decoding

✅ No advanced tools required — just open in a browser and use the system locally

---

📁 File Structure

📄 Stegano_Basic.ipynb
    - Main notebook implementing encoding/decoding for all media types

🌐 steganography-frontend.html
    - Web-based frontend interface for running the process interactively

---

🔧 Tech Stack

Component	Tech Used
Core Language	Python
UI	HTML, JavaScript
Image	OpenCV, NumPy, PIL
Audio	Wave, NumPy
Video	OpenCV
PDF	ReportLab, PyPDF2
Notebook	Jupyter (for demos/test)

---

▶️ How to Use

Option 1: Use via Notebook

1. Open Stegano_Basic.ipynb in Jupyter
2. Run the cells under desired media type (image/audio/video/pdf)
3. Encode your message, save the stego-media
4. Use decode cells to retrieve message

Option 2: Use via Frontend

1. Open steganography-frontend.html in a browser
2. Select file and message
3. Click "Encode" or "Decode"
4. Save or extract results

---

🎓 Educational Value

This capstone project provides hands-on exposure to:

• Data encoding/decoding theory
• Digital media manipulation
• Practical cryptography principles
• Python multimedia libraries
• Secure communication techniques

---

👨‍🎓 Developed By

Himanshu Sayankar Rugwed Yawalkar Arya Dashputra

🏁 Final Note

Whether you're sharing a secret through a song or an image, this system ensures it's hidden in plain sight. Perfect for educational demos, research, or entry-level secure communication systems.