Threshold-based Steganography: A Novel Technique for Improved Payload and SNR

Steganography is the art of hiding user information in various file types including image, audio and video. Security of steganography lies in imperceptibility of secret information in the cover image. Human Visual System (HVS) is not able to detect the changes in low color values of an image. To the best of our knowledge, none of the available steganographic techniques have exploited this weakness of HVS. In this paper, a new LSB technique is presented which hides information in the cover image taking into account the pixel value of color or grey level of every pixel. Our experiments show that the proposed technique has a high payload and low perceptibility of secret information hidden in the cover image as compared to the existing Least Significant Bit (LSB) based algorithms. We have used MATLAB for the implementation of proposed algorithm.