Enhancing PIGPEN Image Steganography Method by Using Zigzag Scanning

Abstract

Steganography is the art and science of writing hidden messages in such a way that no one suspects the existence of the message, a form of security through obscurity. Many different carrier file formats can be used, but digital images are the most popular because of their frequency on the internet. In this paper explains the PIGPEN image steganography technique which modifies the secret message itself not the technique of embedding. This technique represents 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. The PIGPEN technique will be enhanced by using the zigzag scanning to increase the security and achieves higher visual quality as indicated by the high peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) in spite of hiding a large number of secret bits in the image.