Utilizing Image Color Channels for High Payload Embedding

Abstract

Steganography is the technique which has been used in many fields for hiding information and many different versions for each application are available in the literature. This chapter demonstrates how to increase the security level and to improve the storage capacity of hidden data, with compression techniques. The security level is increased by randomly distributing the text message over the entire image instead of clustering within specific image portions. The degradation of the images can be minimized by changing only one least significant bit per color channel for hiding the message. Using steganography alone with simple LSB has a potential problem that the secret message is easily detectable from the histogram analysis method. To improve the security as well as the image embedding capacity indirectly, a compression based scheme is introduced. Various tests have been done to check the storage capacity and message distribution.