FPGA Implementation of LSB-Based Steganography

Steganography, which is popular as an image processing technology, is the art of using digital images to hide a secret message in such a way that its existence can only be discovered by the sender and the intended receiver. This technique has the advantage of concealing secret information in a cover medium without drawing attention to it, unlike cryptography, which tries to convert data into something messy or meaningless. In this paper, we propose two efficient least significant bit (LSB)-based steganography techniques for designing an image-based steganography system on chip using hardware description language (HDL). The proposed techniques manipulate the LSB plane of the cover image to embed text inside it. The output of these algorithms is a stego-image which has the same quality as that of the original image. We also implement the proposed techniques using the Altera field programmable gate array (FPGA) and Quartus II design software.