Random image steganography in spatial domain

Abstract

Steganography is an art of hiding information in some media. This paper describes various image steganography techniques, based on spatial domain and by considering pixel values in binary format. Spatial domain is based on physical location of pixels in an image. Generally 8 bit gray level or colour images can be used as a cover to hide data. Again binary representations of these pixels are considered to hide secret information. Random bits from these bytes are used to replace the bits of secret. In this paper, many steganography techniques can be used like Least Significant Bit (LSB), layout management schemes, replacing only 1's or only zero's from lower nibble from the byte are considered for hiding secret message in an image. Along with these techniques, some more methods are proposed, based on selection of random pixels from an image and again secret data is hidden in random bits of these randomly selected pixels. For this purpose, many parameters of an image are considered like physical location of pixels, intensity value of pixel, etc.