Image hiding using upper-lower decomposition technique

Data security is one of the most important sciences nowadays. There is a huge amount of data transferred over the internet each moment and this data should be secured. Steganography is a type of data security technique that is used to hide the secret message into a cover object. Image steganography is the technique that hides an image in another image. This paper proposed a technique that depends on Lower-Upper (LU) decomposition. In the proposed technique LU decomposition is applied for both cover and secret images. The proposed method was tested using different grayscale and color images. The proposed technique achieved high results in terms of Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR), Structural Similarity Index Measure (SSIM), and Normalized Cross-Correlation (NCC). The PSNR for the cover image is ranging from 36 to 44 dB. The similarity between the secret image and the extracted image is 100% and the NCC is 1.