An improved LSB embedding technique for image steganography

Steganography is one of the popular methods in information hiding that allows people to communicate secretly. The main advantage of image steganography is that the image within which the secret is encoded does not attract the attention of an attacker. Methods for image steganography always concentrate on maintaining the visual quality of an image while encoding a secret message in it. This paper reports a new algorithm for LSB (Least Significant Bit) replacement based image steganography for RGB color images. The directional aspects of embedding data is explored to develop an improved LSB embedding technique. The results report an improvement in image quality measured by means of PSNR and MSE.