A hybrid technique for quadrant based data hiding using Huffman coding

The paper proposes a robust steganography technique to hide the data in an image. The method proposed uses Huffman coding to minimize the number of bits to be embedded and to improve the security of the information. The security aspect is also improved by using a cryptographic substitution cipher and quadrant based embedding of the data. The quadrant based embedding of data bits helps in distribution of bits uniformly over the entire image rather having concentrated data bits over a particular region. The quality of stego image and the embedding capacity is also improved by the usage of Huffman coding. LSB embedding technique is used in the algorithm for concealing the data in the image.