HIGH CAPACITY AND OPTIMIZED IMAGE STEGANOGRAPHY TECHNIQUE BASED ON ANT COLONY OPTIMIZATION ALGORITHM

The tremendous development of digital technology, it is mandatory to address the security while transmitting information over network in a way that observer couldn’t depict it. Measures to be taken to provide the security by establishing hidden communication using steganography principle which is help to camouflage the secret information in some carrier file such as text, image, audio and video. In this era of hidden data communication, image becoming an effective tool on account of their frequency, capability and accuracy. Image steganography uses an image as a carrier medium to hide the secret data. The main motive of this article is that the uses the combination of frequency domain and optimization method inorder to increasing in robustness. In this article, Integer Wavelet transform is performed into the host image and coefficients have been transformed. ACO optimization algorithm is used to find the optimal coefficients where to hide the data. Furthermore, sample images and information having been demonstrated which proved the increased robustness as well as high level of data embedding capacity.