Implementation and Comparison of different Data Hiding Techniques in Image Steganography

Abstract

The daily use of internet for data transmission is increasing dramatically, day by day. So the security of the data being transferred have also become imperative. There are variety of methods used to ensure the security of this data transfer like Cryptography, Steganography and Watermarking. Steganography is the technique which enables the sender to hide the existence of a message so that it is transmitted undetected. Steganography allows the sender to hide the message within a cover message. There are various techniques existing for image steganography (using image as cover). The main idea of this project is to implement three of the most commonly used image steganography techniques to hide text on image and then compare their efficiency and performance in terms of Mean Squared Error (MSE) and Peak Signal to Noise ratio (PSNR). The existing algorithms used for comparison are LSB technique, Pixel Value Differencing technique [4] and LSB Substitution based on similarity of bit pairs. LSB technique is the simplest method where the secret message is encoded into the LSB of each value in the pixel matrix. In Pixel Value Differencing, two or more successive pixel values are selected and then embedded with data. LSB Substitution embeds information by matching message bit blocks with pixel bit blocks.