Human Visual Based Perception for Steganography

News articles in 2014 stated that 1.8 billion images are uploaded daily to the Internet, and this number is expected to increase annually. However, some of these uploaded images may contain hidden information that can potentially be malicious (e.g. an image that contains hidden information regarding terrorism recruitment) or may cause serious damage (e.g. an employee wishing to hide sensitive company details in an image file and exporting the image to 3rd parties). This research studied the most effective methods in manipulating images to hide information (Data Loss). Significant work has been done on computational algorithmic detection. Yet the desired output from this work was to find the point at which a human can no longer visually establish the difference between an original image and a manipulated image. This research examined the extent of use for file formats, bit depth alterations, least significant bits and message and audio concealment. Findings of this study indicated that audio insertion and picture insertion into cover image files are the strongest in deceiving the human eye. These results have been categorised for the enhancement of the research field for human visual perception for image based steganography.