Message Guided Adaptive Random Steganography using Counting-out Embedding

Digital data protection turns out to be the most essential constituent in the cyber world where digital crime is mounting to its worst. To establish secured data communication a technique called Steganography, one of the fruitful attempts for data hiding, has evolved. The rationale of this scheme is to blot out the message in to an innocuous cover media. For good stego system imperceptibility, randomization and capacity are the important considerations. In this paper we propose a novel keyless random algorithm in image steganography which induces an enhanced security by incorporating "counting-out" embedding. It uses message bits embedded in the current pixel which acts as a key for the next pixel to which data is to be embedded. This method provides adaptive randomization without affecting the imperceptibility and capacity.