LSB Based Steganography using Genetic Algorithm and Visual Cryptography for Secured Data Hiding and Transmission

A large number of commercial steganographic programs use the Least Significant Bit(LSB) embedding as the method of choice for hiding data as it has low computation complexity and high embedding capacity. Although there has been an extensive research work in the past, but majority of the work has no much optimal consideration for robust security towards the encrypted image. The proposed system provides the best approach for secure data hiding and transmission over Networks using LSB based steganography with Genetic Algorithm (GA) and Visual Cryptography (VC). The system here encodes the secret message in least significant bits of the cover image so termed as stego image by using a secret key. Genetic Algorithm and Visual Cryptography has been used for enhancing the security. Genetic Algorithm is used to modify the pixel location of stego image which is another protection lock for the secret message and image and the detection of this is complex. Visual Cryptography is further used to encrypt the modified pixel image by breaking it into two shares based on a specific threshold, later those encrypted shares and the secret key is separately sent to other The main aim of this paper is to design the enhanced secure algorithm which uses both steganography using Genetic Algorithm and Visual Cryptography to ensure improved security and reliability.