Highly Secured Image Steganography Using Particle Swarm Optimization

Steganography is the art and science of concealing secret information in plain sight without being noticed within an innocent media so as not to arouse an eavesdropper’s suspicion and also it can be securely transmitted through network. In this paper novel steganography method based on Particle Swam Optimization (PSO) algorithm is adopted for hiding secret information with good invisibility, high security, high robustness and no less of secret message. The cover image is preprocessed to reduce the pixel range to ensure the secret image is recovered at the destination. In order to improve the security of stego images, secret information is encrypted by means of the PSO algorithm. The Optimum Pixel Adjustment Algorithm (OPAA) is applied after hiding secret image to minimize the embedding error. The proposed technique will produce high secure image steganography system with acceptable level of imperceptibility and less distortion in the cover image. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm has high security and good invisibility. Furthermore, PSNR shows better results compared with other existing steganography techniques.