About Image Steganography
Image Steganography is the process of encoding information inside of an image.
Images each contain many (often millions) of pixels, each of which is a square of a single color.
Each color can be one of over 17 million different values, as expressed in the RGB color model.
RGB stands for red, green, and blue, which are the primary colors of light.
Each color has a value for red between 0 and 255, as well as green and blue.
255 is used because 0-255 includes 256 numbers, which is 2^8, meaning each color takes 8 1s or 0s, or 8 bits, which is 1 byte.
Binary works the same way decimal (base 10) does, where the least significant digits are on the right.
Except in binary each digit's place are powers of 2, not powers of 10. So if the last digit or two are changed, the number remains very similar.
It would be within 0 or 1 of the original number if only 1 bit is changed, and within 3 of the original number if 2 bits are changed.
These changes (especially changing only 1 bit) are rather insignificant when comapred to the entire number being between 0 and 255.
If changed these changes would not appear visable to the human eye.
If we go through each one of the millions of pixels in an image, and set the least significant digits to either a 0 or 1 of our choice, we've sucessfully encoded binary information.
This means that when read, we can get those 0s and 1s, or bits (binary digits) back.
Computers use binary to represent all information, including text, images, and more, so we can encode any information this way, as long as it fits within the image size.
Try It!
To encode information, first upload your image, set the binary to encode, and click the "Encode" button. Download your image to save the result.
If you'd like to encode text information, use the "Text Binary Convert" button, enter the text under "Input", and click "Convert" to get the output in binary under "Output".
Check "Fill Binary Result into Binary Input" if you'd like to automatically fill it instead of copying and pasting
To decode information, first upload your image, then click the "Decode" button. Be patient for a few seconds while the "Binary Decoded" text fills up with your decoded information.
To convert the decoded binary into text, use the "Text Binary Convert" button, check the "Binary to Text" checkbox, and click "Convert".
Click the "Get Binary from Decoded Binary Input" button to get the binary information you decoded instead of copying and pasting. The "Binary to Text" checkbox must be checked to use this feature.
About this Tool
When decoding or getting binary from input, it may take a while because the user interface is dealing with millions of characters of text.
For most images, it should take less than 10 seconds
Loading the image and encoding however, is a much faster process and should happen almost immediately
Click the "Get Binary from Decoded Binary Input" button to get the binary information you decoded instead of copying and pasting. The "Binary to Text" checkbox must be checked to use this feature.