Hybrid of Least Significant Bits and most Significant Bits for Improving Security and Quality of Digital Image Steganography

Abstract

The Security of confidential communication is protected using the most popular type of carrier to hold information known as Image steganography. The Least Significant Bit (LSB) algorithm and the Most Significant Bit (MSB) algorithm are steganography algorithms used for information hiding in digital images both have disadvantages of Low image quality, Security, vulnerability to any small modifications, and long encoding time during message compression. To overcome this limitation, the research proposes a Secured Hybrid algorithm called S-Hybrid to combine (LSB and MSB) bits based on checking Two bits (the least significant bit and the most significant bit) of the cover images and replace them with a secret message which was implemented in Netbeans IDE. However, the S-Hybrid algorithm produced the best stego-image quality. Large cover images made the hybrid algorithm’s quality better. The proposed S-Hybrid had a lesser encoding time than the existing method having the highest compression ratio which reduces the transmission effort making the encoding time short which is correlated to the security and makes the proposed method perform better than the existing one. Therefore, a trade-off exists between the encoding time and the quality of stego-image as demonstrated in this work. Mean-squared error (MSE), Peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), encoding time, and Compression ratio are used for performance evaluation between the proposed S-Hybrid algorithm and the existing Method after embedding messages in digital images.