Enhancing Image Steganography Methods by using New Secret Message Encoding Technique based on Pigpen Cipher (Pigpen Encoding)

Steganography is one of the important information hiding techniques which hides the existence of the message in the cover file. By using steganography, secret messages can be hidden in carriers such as images, audio files, text files and videos. Many different carrier file formats can be used, but digital images are the most popular because of their frequency on the internet. Steganography is used to conceal the information so that no one can sense its existence. In this paper the performance of hiding image technique will be enhanced by modifying the secret message itself not the technique of embedding. That is by using a new encoding technique based on the Pigpen cipher that will represent the secret message characters by two decimal digits only not three decimal digits as ASCII encoding. So, it can save one third of the required space for embedding the message in an image.