Data hiding in Image steganography using Range Technique for secure communication

With the spread of digital data across the world through the internet, the security of private information has raised concern as the data is the primary component of computer communication and lots of techniques are available to afford adequate protection to store the data securely. The cryptography and steganography methodologies are the most ideal ways to provide adequate safety in the field of data communication. Combining steganography with cryptography would be a perfect choice and pictures are the foremost common cover pictures for steganography. The present work focuses on the picture as cover-media and thus image-based steganography and cryptography methodologies are developed to attain significant characteristics such as enhancing data security, very high embedding capacity, and high stego image quality. The Blowfish encryption algorithm is used to enhance security. Uses Range Technique and Random Number Generator also to increase the hiding capacity. In arrange to arbitrarily select the pixel positions the information must cover-up in utilizing the Random Number Generator. The Range Technique is used for hiding the data in the corresponding pixel positions based on the pixel intensities. By fixing the range based on the intensities we can embed more data in an image without changing the image quality. To assess the image quality, the effectiveness of the stego image can be measured by certain common measurements such as Peak Signal to Noise Ratio and Mean Squared Error. Theproposed method tested extensively through many attacks on steganalysis, such as histogram and chi-square analysis.