Enhanced Algorithms for Steganography Based on Least Significant Bit and Secret Image Compression

the data can be secured using various methods, such as cryptography, watermarking, and steganography. For secure communication, an image is utilized as the cover in image steganography. Hiding the secret image requires a large number of bits, thus you need a larger number of pixels in the cover, and this reduces imperceptibility. In this paper, large capacity is hidden in less space inside the cover. The secret image is compressed by only one of the two compression methods, the first is applied Huffman encoding and in the second method, the secret image is compressed to approximately half its size. The second method results in a higher Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) rating and greater robustness. The tent chaotic map is used to obtain random locations. The secret image is hidden using the Least Significant Bit technique (LSB) in the cover pixels corresponding to resulting locations of the chaotic map in the last bit, two, or three randomly, which provides a high level of security. The complete method is carried out in MATLAB, and the results are analyzed, which shows greater protection for hidden information. According to the quantitative results, our proposed technique gets the highest PSNR between 44.00 and 47.986.