G.G.Rajput and Ramesh Chavan, Rani Channamma University, India

Image Steganography is a technique for securing the secret message using a cover image in such a manner that the alterations made to the image are perceptually indiscernible. In this paper a novel method for secret message hiding in color images is proposed. The message is encoded by extracting the RGB components of a color image. Run length encoding is performed on the data and insertion of the data in least significiant bits(LSB) of the pixel is guided by linear congruential generator (LCG). A 3R-3G-2B LSB pattern is recommended for insertion of the data making the information more secure without bringing any significant distortions to the original image. The experiments performed on various color images demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed algorithm in terms of PSNR of cover image and that of stego-image.

cover, secret message, LSB, LCG, RLE, stego-image.