29 Tamanna Garg, Sonia Vatta International Journal of Computer & Mathematical Sciences IJCMS ISSN 2347 – 8527 Volume 3, Issue 4 June 2014 RESEARCH PAPER ON ENHANCING DATA COMPRESSION RATE USING STEGANOGRAPHY Tamanna Garg School of Computer Science & Engineering Bahra University, Shimla Hills, India. Sonia Vatta School of Computer Science & Engineering Bahra University, Shimla Hills, India. ABSTRACT-In this paper, description of a compression algorithm based o n steganography has been narrated. The compression algorithm has been used to develop an application which will help the users to hide large size text documents inside small size images. Maximum bits to be hidden per pixel can be increased to eight with the help of the developed compression application. After hiding the data inside an image, there appears to be no visible distortion at all. Also the application is compatible with all the documents and image formats. The developed application automatically converts the output stego image in bmp format. Keywords- steganography, cryptography , LSB, embedding, extraction, secret key, compression. I.INTRODUCTION In the contemporary era there is a dire need to convey confidential information secretly. Steganography serves the above said purpose in a frictionless way by hiding information inside the carrier. In other words steganography facilitates the process of hiding any information related document in carrier such a way that the existence of hidden information can’t even be judged by anyone. Image steganography is very prominent now-a- days. Hiding small size information in small or large images is an easy task but hiding large size information in small images is very complicated. In this research work, there is the narration of a compression algorithm which has been used to design an application capable of hiding large documents in small images without any changes. The developed compression algorithm has a capability of hiding data up to eight bits per pixel. The primary objective of steganography is to avoid drawing attention to the transmission of hidden information. The basic terminologies used in steganography systems are: the cover message, secret message, the secret key and embedding algorithm. In this research work, the embedding algorithm is the compression algorithm. The cover message is the carrier of the message such as image, video, audio, text or some other digital media. Here the carrier is an image. The secret message is the information which is needed to be hidden in the suitable digital media. The secret information in this work is in the form of any text format. The secret key is usually used to encrypt the message to have more security. The embedding algorithm is the way or the idea that is generally used to embed the secret information in the cover message.