Abstract: Today’s the rise of the internet has become the most important factor of information technology and communication but beside this the threat of information security increases. It’s become very important to give security to the data so that no illegal person can access it. The two main techniques are used, first is cryptography and second is steganography. Both are used for data security purpose. Cryptography changes the form of the data and steganography fully conceals its presence from the users, except the intended receiver. The steganography is a powerful security method with which we can hide a secret message inside an object. Steganography is a technique used to protect the data by just hiding the data into data or information behind information. Currently, many types of steganography techniques are being used such as text, image, audio/video and protocol but digital images are the most widely used. There are many steganography procedures in which everyone has its own strength and weakness in terms of security and complexity. Some of which provides hiddenness of information while some provides a huge secret message to be hidden. This dissertation provides an overview of steganography specially image steganography and its uses. It attempts to design and develop the good steganography algorithm and briefly describes about the Least Significant Bit image steganography algorithm and also provides an improved version of LSB. In this dissertation, two parameters are used in order to measure the quality of image. First is PSNR and second is MSE.

Keywords: Steganography, Visual Cryptography, Steganography Techniques, Stego Image, PSNR, MSE.