Image Steganography Based on Random Pixel Addition and Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT)

Abstract

As the boom in digital technology has gained momentum, there has been a great increase in the importance of digital images. Though encryption mechanisms are able to protect the data from the unauthorized intruders, still they remain vulnerable to threats and attacks on the encryption method being breached. Therefore, steganography plays an effective role as being a strong technique that evades the intruder from identifying or recognizing the confidential digital image under a normal cover data. This paper presents a steganographic approach based on Discrete Cosine Transform and subsequent pixel injection for achieving image steganography. It has been shown that the proposed technique achieves high values of PSNR and throughput while yielding low values of MSE.