Who decides hiding capacity? I, the pixel intensity
Rengarajan Amirtharajan, K. Ramkrishnan, M. Vivek Krishna, J. Nandhini, John Bosco Balaguru Rayappan · 2012
Cryptography fails at feigning hackers about the presence of secret data, but Steganography with its many, efficient and effective techniques, camouflages the fact that data has been hidden, thus overcoming cryptography's Achilles heel. It includes hiding the message in a funny photo, or the melodious number or in extravagant hair standing videos. Steganography works with a cover image, containing the whole secret message to be transferred but based on a few criteria. These criteria are called randomizations which are introduced between the cover image and secret message, thereby keeping them secure. This paper proposes a variant of pixel indicator methodology to randomize and vary the capacity of the cover image. Initially the cover image is split into Red(R), Green (G) and Blue Plane (B). The lowest intensity among R, G and B would be the indicator channel and the remaining are data channels. The number of bits of secret data that could be embedded on the data channel is based on the MSB's of the same. If for a case R is Indicator channel and GB are the data channels then MSB (if BG return 00, 1 bit is embedded on that data channel. Similarly, if (B, G) is 01, then 2 bits are embedded, if B, G is 10, 3 bits are embedded and finally, if (B,G) =11, then 4 bits are embedded. Simulation has been performed to test the effectiveness & complexity of the proposed methodology.