Security enhanced digital image steganography based on successive Arnold transformation

Abstract

Steganography is a process of secret communication where a piece of information or secret message is hidden in such a way that the very existence of the secret information remains concealed without raising any suspicion in the minds of the viewers and hence preventing its detection. This is generally achieved by embedding a piece of information inside another piece of innocent looking information and can be a spatial or time or transform domain method. All these methods hide information in different types of media such as text, image, audio, video etc. Amongst these varieties of available media, digital images are more commonly used for implementation of data hiding techniques because of their size and popularity. This paper uses a spatial domain LSB substitution method for information embedding and Arnold transformation is successively applied twice in two different phases in order to achieve higher security. The system is tested and validated against a series of standard gray scale images and the results thus obtained are found to be highly promising. © 2012 Springer-Verlag GmbH.