DEVELOPMENT OF NOVEL COMPARISON BASED STEGANOGRAPHY ALGORITHMS ON MULTIMEDIA TO HIDE PRIVATE DATA

Abstract

Throughout history, humanity has had secrets to safeguard, information that needed to be conveyed to allies in a way that enemies couldn't decipher. To achieve this goal of safeguarding important and valuable information, cryptography and steganography have been frequently used methods both in the past and in today's world. This article introduces a steganographic algorithm designed for hiding data in the color images, along with two different algorithm designs derived from this method. The bits of the hidden message are embedded sequentially into each pixel using the bit comparison. The comparison method works by matching the bits of the image and the message. The least significant bits (LSB) of the carrier (cover) image bytes change depending on the number of matching bits between the carrier image and the hidden message. The proposed method has the potential to hide 1 byte of data within 5 bytes under optimal conditions. The designed algorithms have been tested on a series of color images, and satisfactory results have been achieved in terms of embedding a sufficient amount of data into the images without compromising image quality. The results have been compared with the results of the LSB technique and similar methods based on various performance criteria.