Implementing Random Encoding for Image Steganography

Abstract

Steganography is the art and science of writing hidden messages in such a way that no one, apart from the sender and intended recipient, suspects the existence of the message, a form of security through obscurity. Steganography works by replacing bits of useless or unused data in regular computer

 files (such as graphics, sound, text, HTML, or even video) with bits of different, invisible information. This hidden information can be plain text, cipher text, or even images. Most of the steganographic techniques use sequential encoding and decoding for hiding text or image in a canvas image file. In this paper, we propose a new random encoding technique for image steganography. In this technique a user can hide text or image randomly across pixels in a canvas image file. The final output is an image file that contains the message protected by encryption and encoding. Therefore hidden message is difficult to detect and recover.