FPGA-based secure and noiseless image transmission using lea and optimized bilateral filter

In today’s world, the transmission of secured and noiseless images is a difficult task. Therefore, effective strategies are important for securing data or secret images from attackers. Besides, denoising approaches are important for obtaining noise-free images. For this, an effective crypto-steganography method that is based on a lightweight encryption algorithm (LEA) and the modified least significant bit (MLSB) method for secured transmission is proposed. Moreover, a bilateral filter-based whale optimization algorithm (WOA) is used for image denoising. Before the image transmission, a secret image is encrypted by the LEA algorithm and embedded into the cover image using discrete wavelet transform (DWT) and MLSB techniques. After the image transmission, an extraction process is performed in order to recover the secret image. Finally, a bilateral WOA filter is used to remove the noise from the secret image. The Verilog code for the proposed model is designed and simulated in Xilinx software. Finally, the simulation results show that the proposed filtering technique results in performance that is superior to conventional bilateral and Gaussian filters in terms of the peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and structural similarity index measure (SSIM).