A high capacity text steganography scheme based on huffman compression and color coding

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a high capacity text steganography scheme by using a combination of Move to Front (MTF) encoding, huffman compression, and color coding. The forward email platform is used to hide the secret data. In this scheme, we first encode the secret data using MTF encoding to increase the similarity among the element of the secret data and then apply huffman compression technique on the resultant secret data to obtain huffman codes for condensing the size of the secret data. Part of the compressed secret data is embedded into the email addresses, and residual part of the secret data stream is hide in the text message using a user defined color coding table. To make optimal utilization of number of characters in email ids, the characters added to the email id to indicate the secret data bits are taken from the processed secret data. The new characters are appended just before the ‘@’ symbol of email ids. Hence, the hiding capacity is further increased. Experimental results show that our method performs much better than the existing methods in terms of hiding capacity.