A novel steganography approach based on ant colony optimization

Due to the increasing importance of secretive information transmission, steganography has been noticed greatly. Steganography means hiding data in multimedia systems in a robust way against attacks. In this paper, ant colony optimization (ACO) is utilized to hide message bits in the cover image. Ants search to find appropriate cover pixels in the image. They search using an energy function. The message is being replaced in the pixels which are considered efficient by the ants. The proposed method has been evaluated and acceptable results are provided in comparison with other approaches such as LSB and DCT-M3. The embedding approach is optimized using reverse energy function that puts the secret message in qualified places of the cover image. Results show that embedding the secret message based on reverse energy function improves steganography.