Strengthening Steganoghraphy by Using Crow Search Algorithm of Fingerprint Image

In image steganography, secret communication is implemented to hide secret information into the cover image (used as the carrier to embed secret information) and generate a stego-image (generated image carrying hidden secret information). Nature provides many ideas for computer scientists. One of these ideas is the orderly way in which the organisms work in nature when they are in groups. If the group itself is treated as an individual (the swarm), the swarm is more intelligent than any individual in the group. Crow Search Algorithm (CSA) is a meta-heuristic optimizer where individuals emulate the intelligent behavior in a group of crows. It is based on simulating the intelligent behavior of crow flocks and attempts to imitate the social intelligence of a crow flock in their food gathering process.  This paper presents a novel meta-heuristic approach based on the Crow Search Algorithm (CSA), where at the beginning the color cover image is converted into three channels (RGB) and then those channels are converted into three spaces, which are Y, Cb, Cr. After applying Discrete wavelet transform (DWT) on each space separately, the CSA algorithm is used on each space (YCbCr) to find the best location that will be used to hide secret information, the CSA is used to increase the security force by finding the best locations that have high frequency and are invulnerable to attacks, the DWT is used to increase robustness against noise. The proposed system is implemented on three fingerprint cover images for experiments, for the quality of stego image the histogram, Mean Squared Error (MSE), Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR), Number of Pixel Change Rate Test (NPCR), Structural Similarity Index Metric (SSIM) and Correlation Coefficients (CC) are computed. The result demonstrated the strength of the CSA to hide data, also discovered that using CSA may lead to finding favorable results compared to the other algorithms