A LSB Substitution Oriented Image Hiding Strategy Using Genetic Algorithms.

Image hiding is an important technique in information security field. The simplest method is the least significant bit (LSB) substitution method that embeds a secret image in the least significant bits of the pixels of a host image. The embedding idea is simple, but the embedding process may degrade the host image quality so much that a hacker's suspicion may be raised. To improve the image quality of the stego-image, we applied the LSB substitution and genetic algorithm (GA) to develop two different optimal substitution strategies: one is the global optimal substitution strategy and the other is the local optimal substitution strategy. The experimental results confirm that our methods can provide better image quality than the simple LSB and Wang et al.'s method do while provide large hiding capacity. Key words: image hiding, LSB substitution, genetic algorithm [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]