Text hiding in an image using least significant bit and ant colony optimization

Abstract

In today’s technological world, one of the most challenging problems is information security. In the past ten years, many methods were introduced for securing the secret data transmission over the public network (Internet). One of the best choices to solve such issue is to combine AI and steganography methods. In the presented work, the text will be hidden inside an image depending on the ant colony optimization algorithm for generation of secret key for hiding. First an image is chosen as a carrier media of the secret text, then a set of rows are chosen from carrier image and used as an entry point for the ant colony optimization algorithm where the matrix resulting from the algorithm is used as a key to determine the hiding pixels of secret text bits in an image. The secret text will convert to ASCII code then convert to binary bits and hiding these bits on pixels of image depending on generation key using least significant bits techniques. The experimental results were the high-quality stego images as well as its minimal histogram changeability, also validating the efficiency of the suggested method, and it’s hard to determine pixels of hiding and complexity to determine the sequence of hiding bits.