A New Steganography Algorithm Using Hybrid Fuzzy Neural Networks

Abstract

In recent years, image steganography has been one of the emerging research areas. As the field of information technology is advancing, the need of information security is increasing day by day. Steganography is a widely used communication method in today's scenario which involves sending secret information in appropriate carriers. Since it have an interesting property of concealing the message as well as the existence of the message, steganography is on its evolutionary path to unearth new platforms. As the field of steganalysis is growing exponentially, the need of developing strong steganographic algorithms is also growing. Since the use of steganography is spreading across various fields, the goal of increasing the embedding capacity, security and image quality is being major concerns. We propose a new image steganographic method which is based on random selection of pixels for secret data embedding and post processing the stego-image using Hybrid Fuzzy Neural Networks. The pixels where secret data is to be embedded is selected randomly using a pseudo random key. In the selected pixels the last 2 or 3 bits are used for hiding. The resultant degradation in the quality of stego-image is handled by an efficient pixel adjustment process with the use of fuzzy neural networks.. The experimental results reveal that this method can achieve an embedding capacity of 3 bits per byte with excellent stego-image quality and high imperceptibility.