A Novel Approach to Information Hiding Technique using ASCII Mapping Based Image Steganography

Steganography is hiding secret data in a cover without suspicion. This paper proposes a new information hiding technique using image steganography based on ASCII code matching. The cover image file is first read as decimal and the American Standard Code of Information Interchange (ASCII) code characters are searched, then the ASCII codes positions are stored in a mapping table. Similarly, the secret message is converted into decimal and hence matched to know the characters’ positions. Compression and encryption have also been applied to the characters’ positions of the secret message before being sent. The great advantage is that there will be no change in the image size nor pixels’ values, only the positions of the secret message are rather noted. Moreover, several experimental tests have been applied to demonstrate the efficiency and performance of the proposed method to evaluate it according to the widely used metrics: Mean Squared Error (MSE), Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR) and the hiding capacity. From the security aspect, Structural Similarity Index Measure (SSIM) together with the Histogram analysis have been performed. The proposed method is further compared with some related works. The experimental results verified the effectiveness of the proposed method.