A cycling chaos-based cryptic-free algorithm for image steganography

In recent years, chaotic systems have surfaced to become an important field in steganographic matters. In this paper, we present a simple cryptic-free least significant bits spatial- domain-based steganographic technique that embeds information (a color or a grayscale image) into a color image. The proposed algorithm, called cycling chaos-based steganographic algorithm, comprises two main parts: A cycling chaos function that is used for generating the seeds for pseudorandom number generator (PRNG) and PRNG that is utilized for determining the channel and the pixel positions of the host image in which the sensitive data are stored. The proposed algorithm is compared with two powerful steganographic color image methods in terms of peak signal-to-noise ratio and quality index. The comparisons indicate that the proposed algorithm shows good hiding capacity and fulfills stego-image quality. We also compare our algorithm against some existing steganographic attacks including RS attack, Chi-square test, byte attack and visual attack. The results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can successfully withstand against these attacks.