An FPGA Implementation of Secured Steganography Communication System

Steganography is the idea of hiding secret message in multimedia cover which will be transmitted through the Internet. The cover carriers can be image, video, sound or text data. This paper presents an implementation of color image steganographic system on Field Programmable Gate Array and the information hiding/extracting techniques in various images. The proposed algorithm is based on merge between the idea from the random pixel manipulation methods and the Least Significant Bit (LSB) matching of Steganography embedding and extracting method.  In a proposed steganography hardware approach, Linear Feedback Shift Register (LFSR) method has been used in stego architecture to hide the information in the image. The LFSRs are utilized in this approach as address generators. Different LFSR arrangements using different connection unit have been implemented at the hardware level for hiding/extracting the secret data. Multilayer embedding is implemented in parallel manner with a three-stage pipeline on FPGA.  This work showed attractive results especially in the high throughputs, better stego-image quality, requires little calculation and less utilization of FPGA area. The imperceptibility of the technique combined with high payload, robustness of embedded data and accurate data retrieval renders the proposed Steganography system is suitable for covert communication and secure data transmission applications