A new approach in color image steganography with high level of perceptibility and security

The paper introduces a very efficient and a new steganography technique, while keeping the quality of the cover image with strong security. Though the use of steganography is to hide secret messages in a cover object but the major drawbacks of existing methods are very less embedded payload and low security. To overcome this problem, perceptible degradation of stego-image is occurred. The proposed research work is based on the 24 bit color image steganography with secure hash function in spatial domain. In the present work the cover image has been decomposed into 2 by 2 non-overlapping blocks. Afterwards the first pixel component of each sub-block of RGB channel is used as the indicator. The two least significant bits of the first component specifies the order of secret bit(s) embedding into the rest three pixel components of the given sub-block. The hash values as obtained from six most significant bits decide the number of bits to be embedded in second, third and fourth components. Using this method the perceptible quality degradation has been minimized and hence data capacity has increased and security has also been enhanced.