An ant colony optimisation for data hiding in greyscale images

The least significant bit (LSB) embedding method is one of the most frequently used techniques for information hiding, but it can degrade image quality significantly, particularly when a large number of bits are replaced. In this paper, a new approach to improve the embedding capacity and provide an imperceptible visual quality are proposed, using an effective ant colony optimisation algorithm to locate the optimal positions of the pixels in the over image to hide a data. Experimental results reveal that the stego‐image is visually identical from the original over‐image and the proposed approach can hide a large size of informations with reasonable computation time. Compare these results with previously achieved work also shows a significant improvement.