Improving Security in Mechanical Robots through Steganography Using a Hybrid Method Based on Meta-heuristic Algorithms

Abstract

In this paper, a method is proposed to improve the security of gathered information by mechanical robot
sensors through Steganography Using a Hybrid Method Based on Meta-heuristic Algorithms. In this
method, the desired information is first encoded into pre-stored images and then the image containing the
information, stored or sent to the control center. When needed, information is extracted from the image.
This way, using steganography, secret information are embedded into the image, and the security of the
information collected by the robot is maintained. It is very important to maintain image quality after
steganography. Combined method based on meta-heuristic algorithms contains firefly, bee and cuckoo
search algorithms is used for steganography. According to the results, after the steganography with the
mentioned method, the average PSNR which is used as the image quality assessment index has improved
39.58% compared to the simple LSB method, which is a significant percentage.