Zigzag pixel indicator based secret data hiding method

Steganography allows a user to hide the large amount of secret data within a image and audio files. It has become an interesting research area to enhance the security of network communications, copyright protection etc. The simplest methodology to hiding the data within an image is called LSB substitution method. LSB substitution method take the binary representation of hidden data and overwrite the LSB of each byte with in a cover image. In the proposed system the text data can be embedded into the LSB of cover image using Pixel Indicators in a Zigzag manner. The aim is to provide a better security with high embedding capacity and a better stego image quality than the existing systems. There are two different indicators are used, based on those indicators used in a Zigzag manner the hidden data is embedded into the LSB of the respective cover image. This type of embedding technique making it difficult for any attacker to extract the hidden data from the stego-image. Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio is used to measure the quality of the stego image. The proposed method provides better PSNR value than the existing systems.