EDGE Based Image Steganography for Data Hiding

Abstract

 Steganography is covert communication, which means to hide the very existence of a message from a third party. Due to growing need for security of data, image steganography is gaining popularity. The traditional image steganography algorithm is Least Significant Bit embedding, but it can be easily detected by the attackers as it embeds data sequentially in all pixels. Instead of sequentially embedding data, data can be embedded in random pixels, but it causes speckles in the image. A better approach is to hide the data in the regions like edges. An attacker has less suspicion of the presence of data bits in edges, because pixels in edges appear to be either much brighter or dimmer than their neighbours. So we present a novel technique to hide data in the edges of the image by extending the Least Significant Bit embedding algorithm. This algorithm hides data in the edge pixels and thus ensures better security against attackers.