Abstract Steganography is defined as the knack and science of communicating in a secret way which hides some information on the existence of communication. A steganographic model helps to hide or embed the sender’s secret message in an image known as carrier. For a normal view, it does not give a clue about the existence of a secret message in it. An image can be in any format which is used as a carrier. The sender’s message is covered in this carrier image. The carrier is transmitted in which the message (image) is hidden. In the proposed system Zigzag coded Stenography is introduced. In the proposed scheme the image is first preprocessed using MATLAB software, Image information is converted into the grayscale format and then Binary conversion is done, after applying DCT the image is further split into multiple palettes. The preprocessed data is then provided with the stenographic step with key generation by the VLSI system and then transmitted through the channel. The reverse operation then retrieves the original information by applying IDCT and also removing noise. The proposed Zigzag coded algorithm will have a high embedding rate and embedding payload capacity, less computational complexity and at the same time maintaining the high stego-image quality compared to the existing works.