An Efficient Technique for Image Steganography

Steganography is the art of hiding information that prevents detection without affecting the image. It is a technique to hide secret information in image or audio visuals without any evidence of alteration. Least Significant Bit (LSB) technique can hide only 10 to 15 % of the data amounts of the cover image. LSB techniques used only true color image (24 bits color image). This is because the principle of those techniques was either to replace a special part of the frequency components of the vessel image, or to replace all the least significant bits of a multi-valued image with the secret information. In this work an improved version image steganography is used which will enhance the hiding capacity and also provides security for hidden text. Before hiding the message, it is encrypted using sequential coding & Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) algorithm using 128 bits as an input. In sequential coding technique, code is implemented sequentially starting with the top left pixel and then encodes information from top to bottom and left to right. Then the encrypted message is hidden in the stego-image with the help of random coding and is implemented randomly which encodes pixel across the entire image in an attempt to be less noticeable to analysis. The proposed technique provides more security & more data hiding capacity.