Improving Image Steganography using a Proposed Mutated Levy-Flight Firefly Algorithm

Today's data transmission over an unsecure channel has increased widely. There is a crucial need to some security measures to transmit our data securely. Steganography is an art of "invisible" communication. In steganography the secret message is concealed inside other media cover such as text, image, video and audio form. Firefly Algorithm (FA), metaheuristic algorithm has been used for solving various optimization problems. In this study, Levy flight firefly algorithm (LFA) is employed to solve the problem of 24-bit color image steganography. In the proposed approach, firefly algorithm is initialized with a population of fireflies which will carry each secret byte in the form of different patterns based on rotated reversed method to improve the search process and enhance the security issue. During the iterations, the pattern of the more attractive (brighter) firefly is donated to the attracted (less bright) firefly to improve its quality. The optimal carrier pixels are located by the brightest fireflies and are embedded with those rotated reversed secret bytes using 3-3-2 LSB replacement technique. The experimental results showed the efficiency of the proposed approach in terms of MSE and PSNR in decibels (dB) values. General Terms Security, Optimization Algorithms.