© Steganography and data encryption in images using contrast stretching and AES encryption

Steganography is an important technique in data security, and its purpose is to hide text, especially images, in another environment. This paper presents a new method that uses variable stretching to identify low areas in images to ensure low noise during data acquisition. Private measurements are encrypted using Advanced Encryption Standard and stored in image metadata, ensuring the security and integrity of confidential information. The proposed algorithm is tested on 100 images and achieve 50 percentage increase in embedding capacity and improvement in robustness against attacks such as noise and compression. 30 percentage improvement in PSNR that indicates the better image quality and MSE. That insures the minimal degradation. The proposed method scores over LSB, FFT and DCT algorithms.