Introducing a New Approach to increase the security of information transmission by combining Steganography and visual cryptography in the levels of gray images

The security of concealed information transfer can be ensured by both Steganography and Cryptography. The combination of these two methods can be used to enhance information security. In Cryptography because the message is encrypted, if the message is received by an attacker in the middle of the message, the original message is not disclosed. While Steganography the message information, the hidden message is embedded in an image called the cover image and then sent to the recipient. The proposed method uses Steganography to add Wavelet conversion coefficients that solves the problem of zigzagging the information histogram with LSB of the host image to increase resistance to other methods. Therefore, in this method the correlation between adjacent pixels of the image is minimized, which makes the image histogram not hide in the zigzag cover media despite the four messages being undercover. And to increase the security of undercover file encrypted by visual Cryptography with four subscriptions that even if the hidden media content is encrypted, the key information is not unauthorized. The combination of these two methods is highly secure and the results show that the computational complexity of this method is very low, it has simple algorithm implementation, very short time to run the implemented algorithm, and the recovery of the encrypted image is very easy.