Image steganography method using K-means clustering and encryption techniques

Steganography involves hiding of text, image or any sensitive information inside another image, video or audio in such a way that an attacker will not be able to detect its presence. Steganography is, many times, confused with cryptography as both the techniques are used to secure information. The difference lies in the fact that steganography hides the data so that nothing appears out of ordinary while cryptography encrypts the text, making it difficult for an outsider to infer anything from it even if they do attain the encrypted text. Both of them are combined to increase the security against various malicious attacks. Image Steganography uses an image as the cover media to hide the secret message. In this paper, we propose an image steganography method which clusters the image into various segments and hides data in each of the segment. Various clustering algorithms can be used for image segmentation. Segmentation involves huge set of data in the form of pixels, where each pixel further has three components namely red, green and blue. K-means clustering technique is used to get accurate results. Therefore, we use K-means clustering technique to get accurate results in a small time period.