Steganographic Approach to Enhance Secure Data Communication Using Nonograms

Abstract

In the present scenario the security of data is of utmost importance. While cryptographic techniques render the data unintelligible, steganography conceals the presence of the data itself. There are many pre-existing methods of steganography that involve hiding encrypted data in various mediums such as images, videos, audio, etc. In this project, we are going to focus on data hiding in images. There are numerous ways to embed data into images out of which the most widely used is the least-significant-bit substitution, in this method the least-significant bits of each pixel are substituted with the data instead. Nonograms are Japanese grid-based puzzles which when solved produce a picture composed of square blocks. We are using the puzzle to divide the cover image into blocks and then we use k-means clustering to select the pixels for LSB substitution thereby going a step further and hiding the hidden data in RGB images.