High capacity and low distortion steganography technique using huffman encoding

Abstract

Steganography is a secret information hiding technique in which the very existence of information hiding takes place is concealed Steganography cannot act as a substitute to cryptography instead it can be used in conjunction with cryptography to strengthen the information hiding technique The cover medium suitable for a steganography technique includes a text file image audio video Transmission Control Protocol Internet Protocol packets or any entity which can be digitally represented The proposed work is limited to image on spatial domain Hiding capacity undetectability and robustness are the goals of steganography technique In the proposed work a raw image on spatial domain is used newlinefor embedding secret data Embedding higher payload on a cover image depends upon newlineembedding methodology and the cover image chosen It can also be viewed in another direction of compressing the payload before overlaying To attain minimum distortion and high embedding capacity the secret data is gray coded bit plane coded and later Runlength encoding is carried on the bit plane coded secret data Further it is compressed using Huffman encoding which reduces the size of secret data to be embedded The above process results in minimized pay load representation of the secret data newline newline