Apply bee colony optimization for image steganography with optical pixel adjustment

Abstract

In the recent two decades steganography or data hiding is widely used for concealing secret data instead of using encryption methods. It is used to hide image into a cover media without noticing the presence of the hidden message. Steganography's technique problem is the distortion obtained in the stego-image. This paper presents a new steganography techniques that decreases the stego-image distortion as well as increasing its secrecy. The proposed technique uses Bee Colony Optimization (BCO) along with the well-known Least Significant Bit (LSB) steganography algorithm. The secret image is embedded using LSB algorithm then the BCO with Optimal Pixel Adjustment process (OPAP) algorithm is used to find the best block matching matrix and then find the optimal substitution in the cover image. The calculated PSNR (Peak Signal to Noise Ratio) and MSB (mean square error) show that the proposed algorithm give big quality improvement over the traditional LSB (Least Significant Bit) algorithm and make the proposed technique more robust against attacks.