Secure image steganography in spatial domain

Abstract

Steganography technique is the art of concealing information or data into a digital media that hides the existence of the information in the digital media. Media with and without hidden information are called stego media and cover media, respectively. Digital images have high degree of redundancy in representation thus likeable for hiding data. Image steganography can be mainly classified into spatial domain and transform domain. The very basic technique for image steganography is least significant bit (LSB). There exist a large number of steganography techniques for hiding the secret information or data into digital images. Every method has respective strong and weak points. This work aims to propose an algorithm that increases the hiding capacity with better visual quality, the proposed technique initially compresses the secret information using the lossless Huffman compression technique; furthermore the similarity of the blocks obtained from the cover image and the secret information are measured so that to minimize the alteration of the bits in cover image. Results of the proposed technique are compared with that of existing techniques, the values obtained for the parameter, PSNR (Peak Signal to Noise Ratio), MSE (Mean Square Error), and NCC (Normalized Cross Correlation) are superior to existing techniques.