Minimal Block Knight’s Tour and Edge with LSB Pixel Replacement Based Encrypted Image Steganography

Abstract

The data security of an information is predominant in the digital world and gaining lot of importance. Cryptography and steganography are widely used in providing security to an information. In the proposed algorithm, the image encryption and steganography are performed using Knight’s move in the game of chess called Knight’s Tour Algorithm. Minimum block or square required for a knight’s tour to reach all the squares is 5 × 5 block. The 5 × 5 blocks’ pattern generated is used for image encryption. The encrypted image is then embedded into another image and block shuffling is performed to obtain a crypto-stego image. Proposed algorithm is robust and provides high data security with a good PSNR and SSIM.