Secret Message Protection using Fuzzy Logic and Difference Expansion in Digital Images

Secrete message protection has become a focal point of the network security domain due to the problems of violating the network use policies and unauthorized access of the public network. These problems have led to data protection techniques such as cryptography, and steganography. Cryptography consists of encrypting secrete message to a ciphertext format and steganography consists of concealing the secrete message in codes that make up a digital file, such as an image, audio, and video. Steganography, which is different from cryptography, ensures hiding a secret message for secure transmission over the public network. This paper presents a steganographic approach using digital images for data hiding that aims to providing higher performance by combining fuzzy logic type I to pre-process the cover image and difference expansion techniques. The previous methods have used the original cover image to embed the secrete message. This paper provides a new method that first identifies the edges of a cover image and then proceeds with a difference expansion to embed the secrete message. The experimental results of this work identified an improvement of 10% of the existing method based on increased payload capacity and the visibility of the stego image.