ENHANCED IMAGE STEGANOGRAPHY WITH AES ENCRYPTION AND HYBRID DWT DCT TRANSFORM FOR SECURE DATA HIDING

This paper presents a hybrid image steganography technique that combines the Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) and the Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) with symmetric-key encryption. A short plaintext (Secure Communication 2025) is encrypted via AES-CTR (PBKDF2-derived key) and embedded into a standard cover (Lena, 512 512). We compare DCT-only, DWT-only, and a hybrid DWT+DCT mid-band embedding, and report an end-to-end Spatial LSB+AES baseline. Results indicate high imperceptibility (PSNR >40 dB; SSIM > 0.98) with transform-domain methods; spatial LSB achieves perfect recovery, while hybrid DWT+DCT requires ECC/QIM for strict end-to-end robustness. We provide reproducible code and analysis.