Date of Publication :7th December 2015

Abstract: Steganography has been used immensely in various fields to maintain the confidentiality and integrity of messages transferred via the internet. The need to hide messages has increased with the increase of fraudulent activities in the cyber space. To diminish the number of such cyber crimes a number of optimized and advanced steganographic schemes have been invented by researchers. This paper presents a comparative analysis among the various optimization techniques that have been applied to steganography to achieve better results in terms of quality, capacity and security of stego objects. All the results compared in this paper have been obtained from the application of optimization techniques on gray-scale images and 2- Least Significant Bit (2- LSB) substitution method .Optimization techniques compared in this paper include Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO), Ant Colony Optimization (ACO), Genetic Algorithm (GA) and also hybrid optimization techniques like PSO-GA, PSO-ACO, GA-ACO. This paper also mentions which optimization technique is best suited for spatial domain image steganography, frequency domain image steganography, watermarking and security against steganalysis techniques based on the studies of research work done previously. The limitations of each optimization technique are provided in this work to help researchers decide which technique to apply in a specific steganography scheme to obtain best results.

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