A Novel Approach to Hide Text Data in Colour Image

Steganography, unlike cryptography, is an art of hiding of information in such a manner that it does not attract attention. This ancient practice has been in use for a long time to hide and communicate sensitive data escaping the notice of prying eyes. This artin today's time in the context of image, is being exploited in digital world generically to hide digital signatures and watermarks. While the embedding of this data there is always inevitable deviation of the original image from its natural behaviour, which leads to the trade-off between image visual quality and payload. The noise bed generated thus is used in steganalysis to detect the anomaly in the stego-image. In this paper, a method is proposed which uses the technique of selective embedding as the stego-key to feed the data into the image. The experimental observations affirms the efficiency if this approach. The proposed method can be efficiently employed to add signature to the images without much affecting the natural behaviour of the noise bed generated.