Performance enhancement of stegano visual cryptography using hybrid heuristic techniques

Abstract

The aim of Steganography is to communicate information which is concealed within an alternative message which is noticeable thus protecting the information. It is a data hiding technique which sets secret data within the cover media for hiding its presence. Audio, video, image and text have been applied in order to hide information in steganography. Multimedia steganography is an extremely secure steganography by using secret messages found in bits that are the lowest in the noisy files. The JPEG images consist of several different colour spectra and thus do not reflect much. The technique of steganography is applied to image files for hiding encrypted messages and their corresponding formats in order to get different cryptographic systems. Bit insertion refers to image steganography and its maximum use where the pixel s Least Significant Bit (LSB) has been altered. Cryptography tends to encrypt messages to ensure that they are not easily understood and steganography hides data in such a way that it cannot be easily observed. There is a technique of cryptography known as Visual cryptography (VC) that permits visuals to be encrypted to ensure that decryption is made by the human visual system. There are various techniques of steganography that employ colour composition, sorting of palettes of colour, identifying the relationship between the various colour indices, exaggerated noise, and luminance. The JPEG-JSTEG is one recognized tool for industrial information hiding. It is a distinctive type of a steganographic algorithm that uses a JPEG file as its cover-image. This will replace the LSB for the quantized Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) coefficients having secret messages newline