An Effect of Huffman Encoding with Hybrid Edge Detection in LSB Image Steganography

With the development and spread of technology in the world and its increasing speed, the danger of attacking data has increased and spread with it, therefore, data exchanged between the parties must be protected from hackers and kept confidential. The art of concealing digital data so that no one can surmise its existence is known as steganography. Steganography is used to hide the existence of such data by enclosing the secret in a cover image, creating a new image that is nearly identical to the original. As a result, hidden data within the cover image is shielded from unwanted access. In this study, we suggested a way to hide a greyscale image on the edges of another RGB color image by using a hybrid edge detector between canny and Laplacian of Gaussian (LoG) and applying it to the cover image by OR operation, then dilation on those edges, then compression of the secret image by using Huffman lossless encoding and embedding these secret compressed data in the edges discovered for the cover image by least significant bit (LSB) algorithm. We demonstrated how hiding in the edge area could maintain the Stego image's quality. with good values of PSNR and MSE. Our best results achieved for MSE, PSNR, and SSIM are 0.0526, 60.9207, and 1 respectively. Our algorithm additionally shown that the secret image was correctly and distortion-free retrieved.