Image Steganography Using LSB Substitution: A Comparative Analysis on Different Color Models

Abstract

Information hiding for secure communication has been used for a long time. Steganography is a very popular technique of hiding secret information in other media. The object used to hide the secret information is called the cover object. Different types of cover objects like text, audio, image, and video are used, but image is the most popular among all cover objects. Nowadays color image processing is widely utilized in multimedia, graphics and computer vision applications. Color image can hold a large amount of secret data as compared to the grey image since they have different color components. One of the popular approaches is the substitution of the least significant bits of the cover image by the secret information. Different color models, namely, RGB, YCbCr, YUV, YIQ, CMY, HIS, HSV are used to represent the color image. We have proposed a LSB substitution based algorithm and its performance has been compared for different color models (RGB, YCbCr, YUV, and CMY).