Cryptography using Affine Hill Cipher Combining with Hybrid Edge Detection (Canny-LoG) and LSB for Data Hiding

In our time the rapid growth of internet and digital communications has been required to be protected from illegal users. It is important to secure the information transmitted between the sender and receiver over the communication channels such as the internet, since it is a public environment. Cryptography and Steganography are the most popular techniques used for sending data in secrete way. In this paper, we are proposing a new algorithm that combines both cryptography and steganography in order to increase the level of data security against attackers. In cryptography, we are using affine hill cipher method; while in steganography we are using Hybrid edge detection with LSB to hide the message. Our paper shows how we can use image edges to hide text message. Grayscale images are used for our experiments and a comparison is developed based on using different edge detection operators such as (canny-LoG ) and (Canny-Sobel). Their performance is measured using PSNR (Peak Signal to Noise ratio), MSE (Mean Squared Error) and EC (Embedding Capacity). The results indicate that, using hybrid edge detection (canny- LoG) with LSB for hiding data could provide high embedding capacity than using hybrid edge detection (canny- Sobel) with LSB. We could prove that hiding in the image edge area could preserve the imperceptibility of the Stego-image. This paper has also proved that the secrete message was extracted successfully without any distortion.