A novel image steganography scheme with high embedding capacity and tunable visual image quality based on a genetic algorithm

A novel image steganography scheme with high embedding capacity and tunable visual image quality based on a genetic algorithm

Steganography is knowledge and art of hiding secret data into information which is largely used in infor-mation security systems. Various methods have been proposed in the literature which most of them are not capable of both preventing visual degradation and providing a large embedding capacity. In this paper, we propose a tunable visual image quality and data lossless method in spatial domain based on a genetic algorithm (GA). The main idea of the proposed technique is modeling the steganography prob-lem as a search and optimization problem. Experimental results, in comparison with other currently pop-ular steganography techniques, demonstrate that the proposed algorithm not only achieves high embedding capacity but also enhances the PSNR of the stego image.