Genetic Algorithm based Color Image Steganogaphy using Integer Wavelet Transform and Optimal Pixel Adjustment Process

60 Abstract: Information security has become a cause of concern because of the electronic eavesdropping. For hiding secret information in images, there exist a large variety of steganographic techniques. Some of them are more complex than others and all of them have respective strong and weak points. Different applications have different requirements of the steganography technique used. For example, some applications may require absolute invisibility of the secret information, while others require a larger secret message to be hidden. In short, capacity, robustness and invisibility are three important parameters in information hiding and are quite difficult to achieve in a single algorithm. This paper proposes a novel steganography technique for digital colour image which aims at effective retrieval of hidden data in the colour image without significant degradation in the quality of the colour image. The professed methodology utilizes the least significant bits of the three colour channels (Red, Green, Blue) in a given colour image for embedding the secret message based on Integer Wavelet Transform, Genetic Algorithm and Optimal Pixel Adjustment Process (OPAP). The experimental results show that the proposed method is a secure steganographic method that effectively extracts the hidden message with good image quality and provides reasonable hiding capacity as compared to the adaptive methods of gray scale steganography systems.