8-Rooks Solutions for Image Steganography Technique

Abstract

Exchange of secret messages on the internet is a big issue for the researchers. This raises the need of an information hiding technique, Steganography is an art of hiding digital information in another digital media used as cover. The steganographic method based on Least Significant Bit(LSB) insertion approach provides high degree of visual quality and increases the capacity of the embedded data but secret data is not highly secured by this method. In this paper we proposed a message hiding technique that randomizes the pixel selection for hiding message bits in an image, based on solutions of 8-Rooks problem of placing 8-non-attacking Rooks on an 8*8 chessboard. The cover image is divided into 8*8 pixel blocks and pixels are selected from each block corresponding to the positions of 8-rooks in the different solutions for 8-rooks problem. LSB of the above selected pixels are collected and compared with ASCII code of all the characters in the secret message. Index number of the character matched with ASCII code of collected bits is embedded into the LSB of the last row of an 8*8 pixel block. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm improves the security, robustness and embedding capacity.