Abstract: Any information stored in a computer needs to be kept secret from the outside users as they may use the data for illegal purposes. In order to achieve this security, we propose a new Steganography scheme for hiding a piece of critical information in a host binary image. Steganography is the practice of concealing a file, message, image, or video within another file, message, image, or video. There are three basic types of Steganography: Image, Text and Audio/Video. Steganography is the science which deals with security issues. It refers to the art and science of writing messages in such a way that no one, apart from the sender and intended recipient, suspects the existence of the message. Main goal of steganography is to protect data from unauthorized users. The two key processes used in Steganography are: Encryption and Decryption. In this paper we use a secret key and a weight matrix to protect the hidden data. Given an image block of size m x n, our scheme can hide as many as log2(mn+1) bits of data in the image by changing at most 2 bits in the image. This scheme can provide highest security, embed more data and maintain higher quality of the host image. The project evaluates the performance of the above mentioned algorithms and suggests the best suitable technique from the comparative study of images. In this paper we have presented a new steganography scheme for hiding critical information in a host binary image. The main idea is to use a secret key and a weight matrixto protect the hidden data and maintain higher quality of the host image. Our scheme is to use the best technique available to provide a higher data hiding ratio, but change less pixels in the original image.

Keywords: Steganography, spatial domain, transform domain, LSB, PVD.