De-noise steganography by enhancing the cover image: a multi-level security approach

A technique that combines both logic and craft only can survive long. A multi-level security mechanism by blending steganogrpahy and visual cryptography is proposed here. Hiding already encrypted data inside an image is of immense value. Encryption is done by visual cryptography and hiding is done through the proposed de-noise Steganography With Selected Noise Bit Replacement Technique (SNBR). By and large, hiding data inside an image makes distortion to the image that leads to suspicions. Instead, this technique tries to remove disturbance or noise that is already present in the image and enhances the cover image through replacing noise bits present in the cover image with secret. In view of the fact that we replace the noise bits with the secret, it improves the quality of the cover medium and consequently the cover seems innocuous. As a result it reduces the chance of steg-analysis. The proposed method called SNBR, uses a location map to guarantee the correct extraction of the secret data. The goal of this study is to avoid degradation of the cover and improve the confidentiality of the information being communicated. Experimental results show that the new method achieves good security and a higher peak signal to noise ratio for the same number of bits per pixel of embedded image.