A Proposed Algorithm For Steganography In Digital Image Based on Least Significant Bit

Data hiding is the art of hiding data for various purposes such as; to maintain private data, secure confidential data and so on. There are lots of techniques used for data hiding and the well known technique is the Steganography. In contemporary terms, Steganography has evolved into a digital strategy of hiding a file in some form of multimedia, such as an image, an audio file or even a video file. This paper presents a new Steganography method based on the spatial domain for encoding extra information in an image by making small modifications to its pixels. The proposed method focuses on one particular popular technique, Least Significant Bit (LSB) Embedding. Instead of using the LSB-1 of the cover for embedding the message, LSB-2 has been used to increase the robustness. LSB-1 may be modified according to the bit of the message, to minimize the difference between the cover and the Stego-cover. For more protection to the message bits a Stego-Key has been used to permute the message bits before embedding it. Experimental results of the modified method shows that the Peak Signal to Noise Ration (PSNR) is grater than the conventional methods of LSBs replacement. Keywords : Steganography, Data hiding, Embedding Data, Information Security, Least Significant Bit.