Assesment of the Image Distortion in Using Various Bit Lengths of Steganographic LSB

Several methods developed and applied for protecting the information. One of these is the stenography. Steganographic techniques are used to transmit the information in the image to the receiver in a secure manner. There are two main principles in the steganographic process. The first one is to hide the message in the image and the second one is to reduce the distortion on the image caused by information hiding. By making changes on digital images, a lot of information can be placed in the image. Nevertheless, changes in the image should not be noticed. In this paper, the effect of using various bit length of the steganographic LSB method on the image distortion is studied. The PSNR, SNR and MSE were used to assess the distortion rates of the images. Histograms were drawn to visualize the differences between original and encoded, “stego-images”.