High capacity image steganography method by using Particle Swarm Optimization

The art of steganography is used to hide the relationship and secret messages between sender and receiver for the sake of information security in communication networks. Capacity, imperceptibility and robustness are three important pillars of steganography requirements. Increasing each of these factors in steganography may result in decreasing the other factors. Optimization methods with respect to an acceptable value for one factor can be used to increase the other factors. In this paper by specifying the scope of PSNR as a measure of imperceptibility and in order to increase capacity, steganography is conducted using PSO algorithm. In the proposed method considering the order of each bit-plane of cover image, steganography is run with a matrix encoding method. In the present study the capacity of stego images for famous cover images is examined. The results show that the proposed method in comparison with some recent ones.