Elevating Image Steganography: A Fusion of MSB Matching and LSB Substitution for Enhanced Concealment Capabilities

In today's rapidly evolving landscape of communication technologies, ensuring the secure delivery of sensitive data has become an essential priority. To overcome these difficulties, different steganography and data encryption methods have been proposed by researchers to secure communications. Most of the proposed steganography techniques achieve higher embedding capacities without compromising visual imperceptibility using LSB substitution. In this work, we have an approach that utilizes a combination of Most Significant Bit (MSB) matching and Least Significant Bit (LSB) substitution. The proposed algorithm divides confidential messages into pairs of bits and connects them with the MSBs of individual pixels using pair matching, enabling the storage of 6 bits in one pixel by modifying a maximum of three bits. The proposed technique is evaluated using embedding capacity and Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) score, we compared our work with the Zakariya scheme the results showed a significant increase in data concealment capacity. The achieved results of our work show that our algorithm demonstrates an improvement in hiding capacity from 11% to 22% for different data samples while maintaining a minimum Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) of 37 dB. These findings highlight the effectiveness and trustworthiness of the proposed algorithm in securing the communication process and maintaining visual integrity.