Run-Length Encoding Based Lossless Compressed Image Steganography

Abstract

Secure communication with the least possible utilization of communication link is the need of modern communication systems. The treats and limited bandwidth of the Internet requires high security and size reduction of data. The technique proposed in this paper basically hides secret data in images and also reduce the size of images to meet the need of bandwidth limited communication systems. Least significant bits substitution method has been adopted for data hiding in the image and then RLE scheme has been used to reduce the size of stego image. A hiding capacity of 50% has been achieved with a reasonable high PSNR (i.e. greater than 30dB limit) and a compression ratio of greater than 1 has been achieved. The proposed method insures the 100% recovery of the secret message at the receiver side