Chaos based Edge Adaptive Image Steganography

Steganography is the science of hiding data into innocuous objects such that the existence of the hidden data remains imperceptible to an adversary. Steganography in images have varied techniques of implementation developed over time. Protection of the hidden information from an adversary is the most important goal of steganography and hence it is obvious that the security of a steganography system will increase if the payload remains illegible to an attacker even if he holds knowledge about the embedding method. It is also evident that certain areas in an image are more efficient for hiding data than the other parts of the image. These are called Regions of Interest or ROIs. Edge areas in an image are one of the ROIs that can be used for steganography. This paper proposes an edge adaptive image steganography mechanism which combines the benefits of matrix encoding and LSBM to embed data and also uses a chaotic mapping scheme to provide enhanced security to the payload. Efforts have been given to ensure that the proposed mechanism conforms to high Imperceptibility and Fidelity which are the essential quality requirements for any image steganography system. (C) 2013 The Authors. Published by Elsevier