  This paper proposes an improved steganography approach for hiding text
messages in lossless RGB images. The objective of this work is to increase the
security level and to improve the storage capacity with compression techniques.
The security level is increased by randomly distributing the text message over
the entire image instead of clustering within specific image portions. Storage
capacity is increased by utilizing all the color channels for storing
information and providing the source text message compression. The degradation
of the images can be minimized by changing only one least significant bit per
color channel for hiding the message, incurring a very little change in the
original image. Using steganography alone with simple LSB has a potential
problem that the secret message is easily detectable from the histogram
analysis method. To improve the security as well as the image embedding
capacity indirectly, a compression based scheme is introduced. Various tests
have been done to check the storage capacity and message distribution. These
testes show the superiority of the proposed approach with respect to other
existing approaches.
