A Secure Image Steganography using LSB, DCT and Compression Techniques on Raw Images

Steganography is an important area of research in recent years involving a number of applications. It is the science of embedding information into the cover image viz., text, video, and image (payload) without causing statistically significant modification to the cover image. The modern secure image steganography presents a challenging task of transferring the embedded information to the destination without being detected. In this paper we present an image based steganography that combines Least Significant Bit(LSB), Discrete Cosine Transform(DCT), and compression techniques on raw images to enhance the security of the payload. Initially, the LSB algorithm is used to embed the payload bits into the cover image to derive the stego-image. The stego-image is transformed from spatial domain to the frequency domain using DCT. Finally quantization and runlength coding algorithms are used for compressing the stego-image to enhance its security. It is observed that secure images with low MSE and BER are transferred without using any password, in comparison with earlier works.