Image steganography by closest pixel-pair mapping

Steganography is one of the important and elegant tools used to securely transfer secret message in an imperceptible manner. Visual Steganography is another added feature of it. It is the steganographic method involving multimedia files like image, video etc. to hide a secret message. However this method may result in the distortion of the colour frequencies of the cover image which is predictable by some analysis. Here in this paper we have proposed a method for steganography which results in absolutely no distortion of the cover image. The proposed image is independent of the size of the cover image and the secret image i.e. a larger image can be hidden in a smaller image. The proposed method also uses AES Encryption for secure transfer of the stego-key. The nexus of this cover image and the encrypted data serves the purpose of secure transfer of secret data.