Optimizing Cost Using Knight Tour for Content Adaptive Steganography

Steganography includes all the actions that must be transported out to hide and protect the secret data inside the cover image encryption. In the first step of the embedding phase, the plain text will be encrypted, there are several encryption methods that can be applied to encrypt the data, but in this situation, we need a method that does not produce a cipher text longer than the plain text. The embedding algorithm is the most prominent part of the steganographic methods. In fact, it defines which pixels of the image should be changed and also in what order they will be altered with the secret data. The embedding algorithm of the proposed steganographic method is based on the described “Knight Tour” algorithm. The “Knight tour” algorithm is a suitable technique to formulate the sequence of the secret bit stream within the image pixels. When the sequence of the target pixels is defined in the previous step, now it‟s the time to replace the least significant bits of the image pixels with the bit stream of the secret message.