A New Approach of Image Security through Combination of Steganography and Cryptography

Abstract

Steganography is a technique to make secret messages imperceptible to human eyes by embedding them in vessel data, such as images or other multimedia data. The vessel data, like an image, is referred to as the cover image, and the embedded data is called internal information, or the secret image. The internal information (secret image) is not particularly valuable to the data owner. Digital Steganography utilizes a host data to hide information in such a way that it remains imperceptible to a human observer. In this paper, an image Steganography system is proposed, where data hiding (embedding) is performed in the bit planes of an encrypted image using cryptography techniques. The cryptographic technique enhances data hiding capacity while maintaining the imperceptibility of the hidden data. The proposed system demonstrates a high data hiding capacity, as traditional steganography techniques have limited information-hiding capabilities, often concealing only about 10% or less of the vessel data. Our new Steganography system uses an image as the vessel data and embeds secret information or images in the bit planes of the image using a standard steganography technique (LSB Technique). The results presented show the performance of the proposed system.