BUMBLE BEE OPTIMIZATION ALGORITHM BASED OPTIMIZED DATA HIDING FOR IMAGE STEGANOGRAPHY

Abstract

The most important aspect of all forms of confidential communication is security. Although cryptography can be used to safeguard information, it also reveals the presence of covert communication. As a result, steganography, the art of secret communication, was devised. Steganography conceals the presence of covert communication by putting the secret information in a cover image. The inserting process generates the variability in the cover image that negatively impact the imperceptibility parameter. In this paper, we have designed an optimized data hiding method based on bumble bee optimization algorithm. The bumble bee optimization algorithm searches the optimal secret data order before data hiding. After determining the optimal secret data order, the data hiding is achieved using least significant bit (LSB) method. Besides that, in the proposed method, optimal cover image is also chosen by determining the 0’s and 1’s probability in the LSB of the cover image. The performance evaluation of the proposed method is done on five standard dataset images and performance evaluation is done using mean square error (MSE), peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR), and embedding capacity (EC). The result shows that the proposed method reduces the MSE and enhances the PSNR without impacting the embedding capacity.