Enhancement of Image Steganography Using Compression Techniques

Abstract

In a world of digital technology, maintaining the security of the secret data has become a great challenge. One way to achieve this is to encrypt the message before it is sent. But encryption draws the attention of third parties, which may cause the third party to seek to break the encryption and to detect the original message. Another way is steganography, steganography is the art and science of writing hidden Messages in such a way that no one, apart from the sender and intended recipient, Suspects the existence of the message. In this research apply Multilevel Steganography for image steganography was presented. MLS consists of at least two steganography methods utilized respectively. Two-levels of steganography have been applied; the first level is called (the upper-level), and it has been applied using enhanced LSB (secure LSB-L1) image steganography, the secret data in this level are English text, and the cover is Bitmap image, the output is a stego_image called (intermediate image). And the second level is called (the lower-level); it has been applied using another enhance LSB (secure LSB-L2) based image steganography. In this level, another Bitmap(BMP) image has been used as a cover image and embeds (the BMP image output from level one) as a secure data and generates the new BMP image as stego image