A steganography approach based on particle swarm optimization and least significant bit in color images

Image steganography conceals data within a target image to the point that it becomes invisible to the naked eye. Stenography is the provision of superior imperceptibility of a stego-image that minimizes image distortions and is preferred for data concealment due to its simplicity. The most favored of its subclass is the Least Significant Bit (LSB) substitution approach; however, this approach suffers from inadequate concealment of secret messages. The target image needs to be optimized so that data can be concealed within the more essential bits. This paper outlines an optimized solution based on the Standard Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO), and the results confirm its effectiveness in concealing hidden texts within images relative to the standard LSB substitution method and its negligible impact on the overall resulting (original) image quality.