Improved-PSO Approach for a Steganographic Embedding Scheme

In this paper, we intend to tackle the steganography task by a bio-inspired approach. Indeed, a novel embedding scheme using the substitution principle of LSB and related to an improved version of particle swarm optimization algorithm is proposed. To fulfill the requirement of an efficient steganographic tool, some updating at the evolution rules of a particle were done. The improved-PSO embedding scheme looks for the best pixels locations, and eventually the best pixels bits to hide secret messages -both text and image- without degrading the quality of the original image. Thus, the robustness of the proposed steganographic scheme relates strongly on the strength of the improved-PSO algorithm in order to achieve higher imperceptibility. Three test cases were undertaken to highlight the performance of the improved-PSO embedding scheme.