A Steganographic Method for Color Images using the Salp Swarm Algorithm and Chaotic Maps

The availability of high resolution images allows for using steganography to hide the presence of secret information. An issue of importance is to guarantee that the hidden data neither affects the quality of the images nor is it visually perceived. Another factor to consider is the capacity of embedding in the cover images without detection. In this paper we employ the Discrete Cosine Transform compression with quantization for lossy compression. We use the Salp Swarm Algorithm in conjunction with chaotic maps to find optimal locations in the cover images for data embedding in the LSBs. When chaotic maps are inserted into the SSA algorithm environment, the proposed method has achieved satisfactory results with minimal impact on the PSNR.