An improved image steganography scheme with high visual image quality

With the advent of internet, secured transmission of data over networks offers a great challenge. This problem of secrecy of information has drawn a lot of attention due to its immense demand in real life applications such as information security systems. The objective of this study consist of three-fold. In the first phase, we propose an embedding algorithm to hide a secret image within the cover image. In the second phase, the stego image quality is optimized using GA. Then, in the third phase, we have presented the procedure to extract the secret image from the optimized stego image with 100% data lossless. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method significantly outperforms the five state-of-the-art steganography techniques known to date in terms of enhanced peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR) of the stego image.