Implementation Analysis of Covert Data Hiding Techniques

Modern communication system requires privacy of the data to be maintained at all levels and in order to maintain the privacy it is important to hide them during the transmission. With an everlasting need of hiding the data, methods to hide data during transmission becomes an important research issue. Steganography provides a kind of data hiding method that conceal the existence of the secret messages in the media. Today Steganography is mostly used for hiding a data. An image is selected as the media to hide the secret message (text). The advantage of steganography is that it can be used to secretly transmit messages without the fact of the transmission being discovered. Steganalysis is detection of steganography by a third party. Steganalysis analyze whether a given content, contains any secret message hidden into it, or we can say that "The Investigation of Hidden Information is required". Fairly good amount of work is done in the field of Steganography. It is observed that most of the steganographic research till date has been towards designing algorithm which generate stego images which are as close to the cover as possible. Different Algorithms coding schemes proved to be good for this method. Main focus in this research work is to develop steganography algorithms for improving performance in terms of capacity, robustness & perceptibility. In this research work, main goal is to discuss about some of many well known existing embedding techniques, which are used in steganography like LSB (Least Significant Bit) substitution method, Adjacent Pixel value difference method, JSteg, Outguess, pixels swapping method, F3 and F4 algorithm. Comparison of existing techniques with the new proposed techniques like Concealogram, Pixel Pair Value, Multiple LSB hiding based on pixel value and MSB value in terms of capacity, delectability (perceptibility), Robustness to attacks, PSNR and execution time has been done in this work.