High security data hiding using image cropping and LSB least significant bit steganography

Abstract

A high security data hiding approach using image cropping and Least Significant Bit (LSB) steganography is proposed. The predefined certain secret coordinate crops are extracted from the cover image. The secret text message is divided into parts with the same image crops. Each part of the secret text message is embedded into an image crop with secret sequence using LSB approach. The embedding is done using the cover image of three color channels. The stego image is given by reassembling the image and the stego crops. A detailed comparative study is performed between the proposed approach and the other state-of-the-art approaches. This comparison is based on visualization to detect any degradation in stego image, difficulty of extracting the embedded data by any unauthorized viewer, Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) of stego image, and the embedding algorithm CPU time. Experimental results shows that the proposed approach is more secure compared with the other traditional approaches.