Data Hiding and Security using Steganography

Communication has to be secure in order to be kept private. The latest developments in the field of digital communication have made secret communication possible. Image hiding is a method in which a secret image is hidden in a cover image thereby forming a hybrid or stego image. In this project, data hiding is performed by taking difference value of three and two neighbouring pixels. But the data is only hidden in edge pixels of the image. Ant colony optimization (ACO) is an optimization algorithm inspired by the natural behaviour of ant species that ants deposit pheromone on the ground for foraging. In this project, ACO is used to tackle the image edge detection problem. The proposed ACO-based edge detection approach is able to establish a pheromone matrix that represents the edge information presented at each pixel position of the image, according to the movements of a number of ants which are dispatched to move on the image. Furthermore, the movements of these ants are driven by the local variation of the image's intensity values. This method enhances security and the quality of image in spite of high capacity of concealed information. Error correction mechanism using hamming code is applied to ensure reliable secret communication.