A New Method of Image Steganography Using 7th Bit of a Pixel as Indicator by Introducing the Successive Temporary Pixel in the Gray Scale Image

As the internet has become the medium for transferring the sensitive information, the security of the transferred message has become the utmost priority. Image steganography has emerged out as the eminent tool of information hiding that ensures the security of the transmitted data. Image files provide high capacity, and their frequency of availability over the internet is also high. In this paper, a method of image coding is proposed that hides the information along a selected pixel and on the next value of the selected pixel, that is, pixel + 1. One bit is hidden at the selected pixel, and the second bit is hidden on the pixel +1 value. On the basis of the 7th bit of the pixels of an image, a mathematical function is applied at the 7th bit of the pixels, which generates a temporary variable (pixel + 1). The 7th bit of the selected pixel and 7th bit of pixel + 1 are used for information hiding and extraction. On the basis of a combination of these two values, two bits of the message can be hidden on each pixel. After implementation, the efficiency of the method is checked on the basis of parameters like PSNR and MSE, and then comparison with some already proposed techniques was done. This proposed image steganography showed interesting, promising results when compared with other existing techniques.