HYBRIDIZATION OF DCT BASED STEGANOGRAPHY AND RANDOM GRIDS

With the increasing popularity of information technology in communication network, security has become an inseparable but vital issue for providing for confidentiality, data security, entity authentication and data origin authentication. Steganography is the scheme of hiding data into a cover media to provide confidentiality and secrecy without risking suspicion of an intruder. Visual cryptography is a new technique which provides information security using simple algorithm unlike the complex, computationally intensive algorithms used in other techniques like traditional cryptography. This technique allows visual information to be encrypted in such a way that their decryption can be performed by the Human Visual System (HVS), without any complex cryptographic algorithms. To provide a better secured system that ensures high data capacity and information security, a multilevel security system can be thought for which can be built by incorporating the principles of steganography and visual cryptography.