Image Steganography Using Variable-Rate LSB Approach

Information and communication technology has grown rapidly and internet is the most popular communication medium nowadays. As the demand of more secure transmission has increased, so different steganography approaches have been proposed. In this paper we also present and evaluate my contribution to design the novel approach for image Steganography and named it as variable-rate approach. In this paper three image steganography methods with variable rate of embedding are proposed. A new algorithm is described for hiding a secret image in the least significant bits of a cover image. This method supports both type of images color and gray scale image. How many LSB hides the secret information is decided by the exclusive-or (XOR) operation of a pixel’s neighbor. Experimental results show that the algorithm generally hides images without significant changes to the cover image, where the results are sensitive to the smoothness of the cover image.