Efficient Image Steganography

Abstract

Steganography is the art and science of writing hidden messages in such a way that no one, apart from the sender and intended recipient, suspects the existence of the message, a form of security through obscurity. OR Stenography is an art of secret communication. It is sub discipline of information hiding that focuses on concealing the existence of messages. In this paper this is to develop an algorithm to embed secret message in the form of Text, Image, Audio and Video into a cover (host) image without causing significant perceptual distortion in the stego-image. Further the objective is to extract the embedded secret message from the stego- image without loss of information. Steganography includes the concealment of information within computer files. In digital steganography, electronic communications may include steganographic coding inside of a transport layer, such as a document file, image file, program or protocol. The carrier image file is taken to hide the data. The carrier file contains LSB bits. Some of the bits the carrier file is replaced by secured data file. The operation of recovering data is done in similar manner. The steganography hides the file data to give more security.