An efficient steganographic technique for hiding data

Authors

Mathematics Department, Faculty of Science, Assuit University, Assuit, Egyp

https://doi.org/10.1186/s42787-019-0061-6

Abstract

Steganography is the technique for hiding data and aims to hide data in such a way
that any eavesdropper cannot observe any changes in the original media. The least
significant bit (LSB) is one of the most public techniques in steganography. The classical
technique is LSB substitution. The main idea of this technique is to directly alter some
LSB of the cover image with the secret data. The essential drawback of the available LSB
techniques is that increasing the capacity of the stego image leads to decreasing its
quality. Therefore, the goal of the proposed method is to enhance the capacity taking
high visual quality into consideration. To achieve this goal, some LSB of the cover
image are inverted depending on the secret data for embedding instead of replacing
LSB with the secret data. First, the maximum and minimum values in the secret data are
determined then subtract all values of the secret data from this maximum value. Finally,
make a division for the results and embed the new results into the cover image to
obtain the stego image. The results show that the proposed method gives high
capacity and good imperceptibility in comparison with the previous methods.

Keywords