A Robust Hybrid Steganography Mechanism for Security in Data Communication Networks

Steganography is an art and science of hiding the secret information into a carrier such as image, audio etc. in order to conceal the existence of the data. It can be broadly classified into two categories: Spatial (Time) and Frequency domain. The former technique preserves the quality of the cover image while the latter technique provides robustness during the embedding process. As mentioned, both the techniques have their certain pros. Therefore, in this paper a hybrid scheme based on the merits of the two has been proposed. The scheme is implemented in MATLAB-10 and various performance metrics such as Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR), Mean Square Error (MSE), Correlation coefficient, Time Complexity, Bit Error Rate(BER), effect of Gaussian Noise&salt&paper noise on image are used to evaluate the efficacy of the proposed mechanism in comparison to others in literature. The results show that the proposed mechanism is highly robust to various kinds of attacks and has low time complexity.