New Information Hiding Technique using Features of Image

Abstract

Steganography is a word derived from two Greek words i.e. Stegno and Graphy. Stegno means cover and graphy means writing. It is an important branch of information security which protects the secret information from eavesdropper. Steganography hides the existence of secret information in order to protect it. In this paper we are dealing with image steganography, in which images are used to hide the information in them. Number of image steganography techniques has been proposed so far to achieve the goals of steganography i.e. high payload, less imperceptibility and more robustness. In this paper a new steganography technique for colored image (i.e. RGB images) is introduced. This new introduced technique makes the use of features to hide more information than in other areas of image. As features are considered to be the function of edges therefore in this technique we are using hybrid edge detector to extract the features. In this technique a combination of Canny and fuzzy edge detector is used to detect the optimal edges. After detecting edges 1 bit of red, 4 bits of green and 8 bits of blue channel are used for hiding the secret message bits. For smooth areas an adaptive least significant bit based scheme is used. The newly introduced scheme achieves all the three goals of steganography appropriately.