Privacy preserving data mining using visual steganography and encryption

Steganography is the process of hiding a secret message within an ordinary message & extracting it at its destination. Visual steganography is one of the most secure forms of steganography available today and highly suited for image files. The scope of this paper is to combine steganography and cryptography properties in such a way to make it harder to retrieve the image of the secret message. In this work, the image is sliced, the sliced images are stored and upon match with a search string query the original image is retrieved by merging the individual randomly ordered slices in a regular manner. The image slicing ensures privacy preserving and thread based mining reduces the time complexity of the search algorithm.