Increasing Data Hiding Capacity of Carrier Image Using BPCS Steganography

Steganography means secret writing. It is an ancient technology that hides the data or information in such a way that nobody can see the hidden message or even its existence can-t be predicted. There are several techniques of data hiding like text, audio, image, video etc but all these techniques have limited amount of data hiding capacity. Bit Plane Complexity Segmentation (BPCS) Steganography is a technique that provides near 50 % of data hiding capacity. In this technique data is hidden into the bit planes of the cover image. This technique is based on the characteristics of human vision system (HVS) in which a human can-t see any information in more complex blocks/binary patterns, So that all the complex blocks/binary patterns are replaced by secret data. The main aim of this paper is to provide an introduction to BPCS Steganography and the techniques that can be used to increase the data hiding capacity of BPCS Steganography.