Image Steganography by Mapping Pixels to Letters

Abstract

Problem statement: Steganography hides the very existence of a message so that if successful it generally attracts no suspicion at all. Using steganography, information can be hidden in carriers such as images, audio files, text files, videos and data transmissions. In this study, we proposed a new framework of an image steganography system to hide a digital text of a secret message. Approach: The main idea for this is to use enough number of bits from each pixel in an image (7-bits in this study) to map them to 26 alphabetic English characters ('a'…'z') with some special characters that are mostly using in writing a secret message. The main goal of this method, like any steganography techniques must do, is to hide a text of a secret message in the pixels of the image in such a manner that the human visual system is not able to distinguish between the original and the stego-image, but it can be easily performed by a specialized reader machine. Results: This method was implemented practically on different (long and short) messages and images. The carrier images that are used in the experiments of this research have no discernible change in it. Conclusion: The recorded experimental results showed that this proposed method can be used effectively in the field of steganography.