ANT COLONY OPTIMIZATION BASED OPTIMAL STEGANOGRAPHY TECHNIQUE FOR SECRET IMAGE SHARING SCHEME

Abstract

Data hiding earlier to transmission remains as an essential process for reducing the security issues in the cloud based environment. Image encryption and steganography techniques verify the safety of secret data during the transmission over the Internet. This paper presents a new multiple secret share creation (SSC) with ant colony optimization (ACO) based image steganography (SSC-ACO) technique to achieve security over image transmission. Initially, SSC algorithm is applied to generate a set of different shares for the applied image. Then, the ACO algorithm based image steganography technique is employed to generate the stego images for the applied cover and share images. The utilization of image steganography technique comprises a set of shares into the cover image to secure the details of the individual shares. The experimental validation of the projected model is tested using diabetic retinopathy (DR) images and the results are examined interms of peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR). The obtained PSNR values ensured the effective performance of the presented model on all the employed test images.