IMAGES STENOGRAPHYTHROUGH HIDING SINGLE AND MULTIPLE DATA USING DIFFERENT STEGANOGRAPHIC TOOLS

The process of information propagation through the Internet may expose it to risk by discovering and stealing. Steganography is the art of hiding the existence of data in another transmission medium to get secret communication. There are several challenges facing the process of data hiding in images, such as embedding capacity, image quality, security, and computational complexity. In order to handle these challenges, this paper brings out a new data hiding system for true color images. The proposed system combines the merits of imperceptibility feature of LSB technique working in spatial domain with robust embedding policy based on salient features guided by human visual perception extracted from transform domain. The system translates the images into HSV color space that has the ability to isolate chromatic and achromatic components with the aim of increasing hiding quality. To improve security of embedding locations, the system uses secret-key for wavelet decomposition. In our case, adaptive LSB substitution method is employed to increase data hiding capacity and reduce embedding and extraction complexity. Final experimental results show the efficiency of the proposed system in terms of security, embedding capacity and the data hiding effect is quite invisible.