Steganographic Technique Using Secure Adaptive Pixel Pair Matching for Embedding Multiple Data Types in Images

Steganography is one of the newly emerging area of development in the field of signal processing. It is the technique of hiding the fact that communication is even taking place, by hiding information in any other information. In this paper, a secure data-hiding method is proposed for hiding multiple datatypes such as text, image and audio within images by Secure Adaptive Pixel Pair Matching(SAPPM) which can be effectively used for colour images as well as gray scale images. The secret message is encrypted using a pseudo random sequence, which is generated according to the secret key given by the user. The encrypted secret message is hidden in cover image using SAPPM algorithm. Compared with previous methods like Least Significant Bit(LSB) substituition, simple Diamond Encoding(DE) and APPM, the proposed method provides a much more stronger algorithm which incorporates cryptography along with steganography, and always have a lower distortion.