Multi Level Image Steganography by Using Pixel Intensity

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 breaking the encryption and detecting 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 thesis, a new concept for performing hidden secret data, called Multi- Level Steganography for image steganography, was presented. MLS consists of at least two stenographic methods utilized respectively. Two-levels of stenography have been applied; The first level is called (the upper-level), and it has been applied using enhance LSB (HS_LSB) image steganography, the secret data in this level is English text, and the cover is gray scale or RGB image, the output is a stego_image called (intermediate image). The second level is called (the lower-level); it has been applied using pixel intensity based image steganography. In this level another RGB image has been used as a cover image and embeds (the RGB or gray scale image output from level one) as a secure data and generates the new RGB image as stego image. After completing the proposed method implementation, many experiments have been conducted. Different sizes of secret messages and different sizes of cover images have been experimented. Finally comparative analysis has been applied to experiments results and presented good result for proposed method.