An Efficient Black Widow Optimization with Signcryption based Image Encryption Technique

Abstract

In last decades, Internet plays a vital medium to transfer sensitive data and the security of the communicated data needs to be high. To accomplish security, image steganography has become a major technique of data hiding which assures the security of the transmitted data. Besides, the images possess maximum capacity and the occurrence of images on the Internet is abundant. With this motivation, this paper presents an efficient black widow optimization (BWO) with signcryption technique called BWO-ST for image steganography. The proposed model involves a multi-level discrete wavelet transform (DWT) transformation is employed. Besides, the optimum pixel selection process takes place using the BWO algorithm and the encryption process is performed using the signcryption technique. In addition, the encrypted image was embedding into the selected pixel point of the cover image. A detailed series of simulation analyses are performed and the results are evaluated under different dimensions. The obtained results showcased the supremacy of the BWO-ST approach compared to other techniques.