Optimized Visualization of Digital Image Steganography using Least Significant Bits and AES for Secret Key Encryption

Data hiding is a technique used to embed secret information into a cover medium, such as an image, audio, or video, with minimal distortion, ensuring the hidden data remains imperceptible to an observer. The key challenge lies in embedding secret information securely while maintaining the original quality of the host medium. In image-based data hiding, this often means ensuring the hidden data cannot be easily detected or extracted, while still preserving the visual integrity of the host image. To overcome this, we propose a combination of AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) encryption and Least Significant Bit (LSB) steganography. The AES encryption is used to protect the secret images, while the LSB technique is applied to embed the encrypted images into the host images, ensuring secure data transfer. The dataset includes grayscale 256x256 images, specifically "aerial.jpg," "airplane.jpg," and "boat.jpg" as host images, and "Secret1," "Secret2," and "Secret3" as the encrypted secret images. Evaluation metrics such as Mean Squared Error (MSE), Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR), Unified Average Changing Intensity (UACI), and Number of Pixels Changed Rate (NPCR) were used to assess both the image quality and security of the stego images. The results showed low MSE (0.0012 to 0.0013), high PSNR (58 dB), and consistent UACI and NPCR values, confirming both the preservation of image quality and the effectiveness of encryption for securing the secret data.