A Data Hiding Approach for Secured Data Communication

"In the digital era preserving the privacy of confidential information is the crucial issue in authentication and secret communication. Cryptography, steganography, data anonymization are few techniques used to preserve the information. Steganography is the process of hiding information into other non-secret sources of information like text, image or audio, so that secret information is not visible to the naked eye. This paper proposes a novel Prime Number Based Embedding (PNBE) approach for efficient data hiding to encode the data in images without any visual distortion. This approach proposes a novel scheme for identifying the embedding location of the data in the image and PNBE algorithm for the encoding and decoding of messages. The proposed approach is demonstrated with benchmark images. The data encoding capacity and quality are tested on different sized images. Experimental results show better hiding capacity in terms of bytes ranging from 6,327 to 12,448 based on the size of the image. The quality of the image is described as Peak to Signal Noise Ratio (PSNR), which computes the quality difference between original and compressed images. The efficiency of the proposed approach is demonstrated using PSNR with higher values. It is observed from the results that the proposed approach outperforms the existing ones in terms of embedding capacity and quality of the images. "