A Novel Approach of Combining Steganography Algorithms

Steganography is the act of hiding a message inside another message in such a way that the hidden message can only be detected by its intended recipient. In this paper, we combined two steganography algorithms namely JSteg and OutGuess algorithms, in order to exploit the beneficial characteristics and features of both algorithms to enhance the protection level for secret images. In our proposed approach, the secret message (image) is first concealed inside another image using JSteg algorithm and the resultant stego-image is further hidden inside a final image using OutGuess 0.1 algorithm. In this combine approach, the tricky nature of hiding an already hidden message is using two different algorithms increases the level of difficulty for a third party to suspect the existence of a secret image in the first place or even successful decode the it. Besides that, the priority given to the choice of a good image size and type in this approach further disguises the secret image and increases the chances that the image could go unnoticed. Results after calculating the capacity and PSNR for images proved that our approach is a good and acceptable steganography system. The model presented here is based on JPEG images.