Pearl pixel steganographic method for grayscale images using location-array method

Abstract

Nowadays, the user of the internet is growing very fast, in which sends and receiving a messages become very easy using social media applications, meanwhile using these applications, the security is a very big issue. Today providing security for the essential data becomes too hard, intruders become smarter. They are using advanced techniques and models to access our data. For a long period cryptography algorithms were operated to protect the important data, but nowadays these algorithms are easily broken by the intruders. The steganography algorithms are considered as the next generation of cryptography; every user is able to create own algorithms to send and receive the important data. In this method, the secret data will embed into image pixel; many more algorithms are designed by the researcher using this idea. All of these algorithms embed the data into an image and transfer the stego image from one end to another end with stego-key at the receiver end with the help of a stego-key, they do the reverse engineering process in the stego image to get the original data which embedded by the sender side. In most of the algorithms, transfer the stego image and key is a very big concern. Since during the transmission time of stego image and key, anyone can make changes into that; like resize the image or cropping the same. If the receiver gets the damaged version of stego image, they can’t get the original message back. In that circumstances transmission of stego-image with stego-key, it needs more space and time to reach the destination as well as need to pay attention to the security. To overcome these problems, the proposed method does not transfer the stego image, due to which it is not required to compare the image before and after data insertion and no need to calculate the peak signal-noise ratio (PSNR). It shares stego key with the proper security key to recognize if any intruder made an attack on that. This method provides good security for the data.