Message encryption with image processing

The paper proposes a new steganographic model for secret data communication. A stack of four modules is used. The "compression module" gives the benefit of entropy coding. The "cryptographic module" provides confidentiality in the communication. To preserve integrity of data, the "hash module" is used with a shared secret key. A technique is proposed in which it is not required that the receiver should know the secret key before reception of the message. For the "steganographic module", an image steganographic method is proposed that is derived from the method of Yeuan-Kuen Lee and Ling-Hwei Chen (see IEEE Proc. Vision, Image and Sig. Process., 2000). As compared to that method, we make little use of the smooth regions of the cover image that provides better image fidelity and perceptual transparency. The proposed method can also hide data in 24 bit true color images. Furthermore, we spread the data on the whole image instead of using part of the image. This steganographic method is used to hide the encrypted communication. Experimental results show the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed model