This paper presents data an Ant colony optimization (ACO) based data hiding technique. ACO is used to detect complex region of cover image and afterward, least significant bits (LSB) substitution is used to hide secret information in the detected complex regions’ pixels. ACO is an algorithm developed inspired by the inborn manners of ant species. The ant leaves pheromone on the ground for searching food and provisions. The proposed ACO-based data hiding in complex region establishes an array of pheromone, also called pheromone matrix, which represents the complex region in sequence at each pixel position of the cover image. The pheromone matrix is developed according to the movements of ants, determined by local differences of the image element’s intensity. The least significant bits of complex region pixels are substituted with message bits, in order to hide secret information. The experimental results, provided, show the significance of the performance of the proposed method
