Steganographic Method Based on Interpolation and Cyclic LSB Substitution of Digital Images

Abstract

In the era of the Internet, many files (text, image, audio, and video) are shared through the Internet. Security is the main issue, during sharing information. To resolve the security problem, two techniques are used to make our information secure, i.e., cryptography and steganography. Cryptography is used for encryption but does not hide the information. So, it is not too much secure. The emerging Internet technology has led to the need for a high level of security which is provided by steganography. Steganography is used to hide the existence of a secret message. As a result, unauthorized users cannot access secret information in different multimedia files. This paper gives a brief overview of steganography, type of steganography, insertion technique used in image steganography search such as LSB, GLM, parity checking, and interpolation. It also includes the application and a set of parameters to test the imperceptibility of an algorithm. In image steganography, the cover medium used for hiding data is an image. The most common technique for image steganography involves the least significant bits (LSBs) of image pixels which are altered with the bits of secret message. There are a lot of limitations in the LSB techniques, due to which many new image steganography techniques are developed. The cyclic LSB technique is such a technique. In this paper, an altered version of the cyclic LSB technique is presented. The advantage of this method is that RGB channels of the image are rotated into the cycle, i.e., red channel is used for hiding first bit, the green channel is used for hiding the second bit, the blue channel is used for hiding third bits, and then this cycle is repeated. 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.