JIT_V4_N3_RP2 Abhishek Bansal Sunil Kumar Muttoo Vinay Kumar Journal on Information Technology 2277-5250 4 3 18 24 Steganography, Knight tour, 8-Queens problem, Least Significant Bit (LSB), Steganalysis A knight tour starts from any square of the chessboard. A tour in which a knight visits every square on the board exactly once is called closed knight tour. A queen can move along column, row and diagonal in both forward and backward direction. In proposed method, the authors divide the cover image into non-overlapping 8x8 pixel blocks. For each block, they place a queen on a square and find the number of prime attacking positions by the queen along knight tour. Then the authors remove these attacking positions from the sequence of knight tour in 8x8 bytes block. They compute number of mismatches between bits in LSB position in 8×8 bytes blocks and corresponding number of bits from encrypted message to be hidden. The queen position that results in minimum distortion is chosen. The process is applied on each block in the cover image. The queen positions determined during embedding phase is recorded as the key and the same is used to extract the hidden message from stego cover. Experimental results performed on different images reveal that this method maintains high degree of imperceptibility. Randomization achieved through knight tour and queen moves provide another level of security against detection. June - August 2015 Copyright © 2015 i-manager publications. All rights reserved. i-manager Publications http://www.imanagerpublications.com/Article.aspx?ArticleId=3487