Design and Implementation Steganography System by using Visible Image

Steganography refers to the technique of concealing secret information into another covermedia, such as audio, video, image and text in such a manner that the very existence of the information is camouflaged while secret is kept from the knowing of attacker. Watermarking is closely related to Stenography except that it hides information in cover object. Watermarking usually serves the purpose of copyright protection and ownership authentication, for example, watermarking can hide a stego- image inside a visible image and user can retrieve the stego-image and secret image in some way. In this paper, we will integrate two algorithms of information hiding, (steganography) F4 algorithm and (visible image) LSB algorithm to improve the level of protection. The secret image is concealed inside a common image through F4 algorithm and the resultant F4 steg-image is then hidden again as a visible image or watermark inside another image by LSB algorithm. To provide more than one level of protection for the hidden message, we will require additional security level to protect the secret image, which leads to increased complexity of retrieving the secrete image. The results prove the success of system after the secret image is retrieved successfully. The value of MSE, SNR and PSNR is calculated, which refers to an acceptable steganography system.