Pixel Indicator Steganography Technique with Enhanced Capacity for RGB Images

Abstract

In the modern era, a lot of information is transferred over the internet. This information has to be transferred securely to retain privacy. Many techniques have been developed so that this information is transferred securely without being intercepted by the third party. Steganography is also such techniques in which information can be transferred securely. In steganography, the existence of secure information is completely hidden from the third party. Only sender and receiver know that about the secret information being transferred. In steganography, information is embedded into some cover medium like text, image, audio or video etc. In image steganography, the image is used as a cover medium to hide the secret data. Most common technique for image steganography involves least significant bits (LSB) of image pixels which are altered with the secret message bits. There are a lot of limitations in the LSB techniques, due to which many new image steganography techniques are developed. Pixel Indicator Technique is such a technique. In this paper, an altered version of the PIT is presented in which advantage of 24 bits of each pixel is taken to hide the data in three data channels of RGB. In this method, no separate key is used for encryption and decryption, thus avoiding any overhead of managing key. This technique provides enhanced capacity and security over any other image steganography techniques.