Indian Journal of Science and Technology

Abstract

Steganography is age old method employed to send/share secret information or message to/with the recipient. The hidden information is extracted at the recipient end by using some key. With the advent of internet as communication media, steganography has appeared in the form of digital image steganography with wide spread advancements. Hiding ­information in Least Significant Bit (LSB) of the host image pixels is one of the most popular methods. In the presented work, an improved LSB technique for textual message embedding is discussed. All three color channels space is used to embed the secret code. Simply manipulating only Least Significant Bit of the pixel is not safe for information hiding and vulnerable to attacks. Therefore, the information is embedded in all three color channels i.e. red, green and blue of the host image by ex-oring of the information bit and pixel bit. The secret message is converted into binary sequence and each bit is xored with R-component pixel value of host image. The resultant xor value is used to manipulate the R-, G- and B-component images for binary sequence insertion to get the stego image. The inverse of the process is used to extract the inserted code from the stego image. The PSNR, entropy, standard deviation and variance for host and stego images are used to evaluate the performance of the algorithm. Utilizing the three color channel enhances the hiding area for the host image three folds. The presented work allows three folds space in host image to embed as many textual information.

Keywords: Entropy, MSE, PSNR, SD