Pixel bit manipulation for encoded hiding — An inherent stego

Steganography is a science dealing with the hiding of the secured information in a harmless signal. The information may be embedded in an image, audio or video file. For image steganography, binary, gray scale or color images may be used as cover-images for hiding the secret data. In this paper a novel information hiding method has been proposed in spatial domain, to improve Imperceptibility, Security and payload using specialized Encoder/Decoder circuit for gray image. In this proposed method, a maximum of 1 or 2 bits has been altered to embed 4 bits of secret data. Furthermore this method would not just embed secret data in Least Significant Bits, it might be embedding the data in 1, 2, 3 and 5 or any one of the 15 possible combinations. This would heighten the security of the proposed method with reasonable imperceptibility.