In todays digital world, protecting sensitive data is very essential. Steganography hides the existence of secret data instead of its content, providing better security for multimedia communication. This paper proposes a new technique for hiding audio files inside images using the Least Significant Bit (LSB) method optimized by the Harris Hawks Optimization (HHO) algorithm. HHO is a nature-inspired metaheuristic that imitates the hunting behavior of Harris hawks to find optimal pixel positions for embedding data. The proposed method is evaluated using Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR), Structural Similarity Index (SSIM), and Mean Square Error (MSE). Experimental results show that HHO achieves better image quality, robustness, and embedding capacity compared to existing methods.

翻译：在当今数字世界中，保护敏感数据至关重要。隐写术通过隐藏秘密数据的存在而非其内容，为多媒体通信提供了更高的安全性。本文提出了一种利用哈里斯鹰优化算法优化的最低有效位方法，将音频文件隐藏于图像中的新技术。哈里斯鹰优化是一种受自然启发的元启发式算法，通过模拟哈里斯鹰的捕食行为来寻找嵌入数据的最佳像素位置。所提方法采用峰值信噪比、结构相似性指数和均方误差进行评估。实验结果表明，与现有方法相比，哈里斯鹰优化在图像质量、鲁棒性和嵌入容量方面均表现更优。