A Novel Steganography Technique for Digital Images Using the Least Significant Bit Substitution Method

Abstract

Communication has become a lot easier in this era of technology, development of high-speed computer networks, and the inexpensive uses of Internet. Therefore, data transmission has become vulnerable to and unsafe from different external attacks. Every communication body wants to secure their data while communicating over the Internet. The internet has various benefits but the main demerit is the privacy and security and the transmission of data over insecure network or channel may happen. Various techniques used for secure communication in order to address these issues, steganography plays an important role. Steganography is the process of obfuscation that makes something incomprehensible and unclear. Different image steganography research methods are proposed recently but each has their advantages and disadvantages and still have necessity to develop some better image steganography mechanisms to achieve the reliability between the basics criteria of image steganography. Therefore, the proposed work, in this paper, is based on the Least Significant Bit (LSB) substitution method. The LSB substitution method can minimize the error rate in embedding process and can achieve greater reliability in criteria, using novel algorithm based on value difference. In this paper, we proposed a novel technique in steganography within the digital images such is RGB, Gray Scale, Texture, Aerial images to achieve higher security, imperceptibility, capacity, and robustness as compared with existing methods. The experimental outcomes of the suggested approach prove further developed strength and justify the feasibility of our research. Through numerical simulations, we observed that the proposed strategy outperformed the next-best current methodology by 5.561 percent in terms of PSNR Correlation score. Additionally, the proposed approach achieved a 6.43 percent better score in PSNR with a variable measure of code inserted in similar images with distinct dimensions. Furthermore, encrypting the same amount of information in images of varying sizes resulted in approximately 6.77 percent improvements. Embedding different sizes of a particular secret message in a different image (such as Gray, Texture, Aerial and RGB images) came out with about 5.466 percent of better score.