Digital data protection turns out to be the most essential constituent in the cyber world where digital crime is mounting to its worst. To establish secured data communication a technique called Steganography, one of the fruitful attempts for data hiding, has evolved. The rationale of this scheme is to blot out the message in to an innocuous cover media. For good stego system imperceptibility, randomization and capacity are the important considerations. In this paper we propose a novel keyless random algorithm in image steganography which induces an enhanced security by incorporating "counting-out" embedding. It uses message bits embedded in the current pixel which acts as a key for the next pixel to which data is to be embedded. This method provides adaptive randomization without affecting the imperceptibility and capacity.

With innovations ruling the world, there has been a phenomenal growth of e-commerce leading to a lot of transactions taking place online in Internet. To safely transfer data, an existing technique called steganography is used. The goal of steganography is to insert a message into a carrier signal so that it can't be detected by unintended recipients. Images, video, and audio being the widespread carrier media steganalysis attempts to discover hidden messages in suspected covers are at the least detectable when they are more randomized. Therefore one of the important considerations in steganography is to have a meliorated randomization technique. To provide better randomization we propose few techniques in image steganography which use adaptive way of randomization by embedding the data in to the bits of -least significant nibble‖ pertaining to bits in -most significant nibble‖.