An Improved Least Significant Bit Image Steganography Method

Information security concerns are evolving and expanding in recent years due to the Internet era where people often transmit private information through the Internet. For this reason, steganography gained much attention and played an emerging role in digital communications. In steganographic technique, the concealed secret information can be carried through several carriers like images, text files, video files, and audio files. In this paper, we handled steganography in digital images since they are the most popular carriers used on the Internet. The main well known steganographic methods for images are: spatial domain and transform domain. The performance and efficiency of these methods are measured and evaluated considering different parameters such as data undetectability, robustness and payload. In this paper, we proposed a solution to improve the image security through appropriate modification of the traditional Least Significant Bit (LSB) technique. The proposed solution improves the performance in terms of security and robustness. Moreover, we have used Huffman Encoding to compress the secret message before it is embedded. In this technique, the message is compressed using both random and selective pattern and at the same time the performance is enhanced using an improved RC4 method. The evaluation of the proposed method demonstrates better results for a bigger message compared to other techniques.