Hiding MP3 in Colour Image using Whale Optimization

Information is the key in today's world and secure transmission is a must. The cryptography is about making cipher and keys management. They assume cipher can be detected and must be strong enough to decipher, but what if the cipher/information is not visible? The cipher would not be detected. The steganography makes this enable. This paper discusses how to hide an MP3 file in a digital image such that it becomes difficult to conclude about the existence of the hidden audio data. Here we utilize the k-LSB of pixels in an image to embed audio data bits into a selected pixel. The pixels are so chosen that the distortion in the image would be minimized due to embedding. This requires comparing all the possible permutations of pixel values, which may lead to exponential time complexity. For faster computation Whale optimization algorithm was used to find the most optimal solution.