Image Steganography: 2-Bit XOR Algorithm Used In YCbCr Color Model With Crypto-algorithm

Abstract

Steganography is a study of invisible communication that typically addresses how the message is concealed. Protection is required when we want to send data across any medium, this is why steganography has been built to safely send data in an image where the human eyes cannot identify it. This paper integrates cryptography and steganography through an image processing technique. YCbCr color model based on the 2-bit XOR LSB image steganography is proposed here in. The proposed scheme is a very safe technique for data concealed in the spatial field for image steganography, which converts an image from the color of RGB to the YCbCr space, and then secret data is concealed inside in the Cr color space component using 2-bit XOR. Before concealed the data in an image, our work introduces a simple crypto algorithm to a text file for getting unreadable format. For the crypto algorithm, we are using Rail Fence Cipher with key 2 for the encryption and decryption of text files. A detailed study has been carried out in the proposed 2-bit XOR substitution algorithm for YCbCr image. Finally, the Mean Square Errors (MSE) and Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR) were contrasted with various encryption techniques. The proposed method is high secure, high PSNR with low MSE values, which indicates that this technique is very effective to conceal data in an image.