Increased Capacity of Information Hiding in LSB's Method for Text and Image

Abstract — Steganography, derived from Greek, literally means “covered writing”. It includes a vast array of secret communications methods that conceal the message’s very existence. These methods include invisible inks, microdots, character arrangement, digital signatures, covert channels, and spread spectrum communications. This paper proposes a new improved version of Least Significant Bit (LSB) method. The approach proposed is simple for implementation when compared to Pixel value Differencing (PVD) method and yet achieves a High embedding capacity and imperceptibility. The proposed method can also be applied to 24 bit color images and achieve embedding capacity much higher than PVD. Keywords — Information Hiding, LSB Matching, PVD Steganography. I. I NTRODUCTION NFORMATION hiding techniques have been receiving much attention today. The main motivation for this is largely due to fear of encryption services getting outlawed [14], and copyright owners who want to track confidential and intellectual property copyright against unauthorized access and use in digital materials such as music, film, book and software through the use of digital watermarks. Encryption and Decryption algorithms are widely used to encrypt secret (confidential) data so that it is not directly accessible to the otherwise illegitimate person and whenever the owner or genuine person requires the data, it can be decrypted with the help of a key or with the help of a retrieving algorithm/function. Steganography has a different approach to deal with this problem. Steganography [15] is an application of information hiding. Steganography or Stego as it is often referred to in the IT community, literally means, "covered writing" which is derived from the Greek language. Steganography is defined by Markus Kahn [3] as follows, "Steganography is the art and science of communicating in a way which hides the existence of the communication. In contrast to Cryptography, where the enemy is allowed to detect, intercept and modify messages without being able to violate certain security premises guaranteed by a