A high stego-image quality steganographic scheme with reversibility and high payload using multiple embedding strategy

Abstract

Tian’s method is a breakthrough reversible data embedding scheme with high embedding capacity measured by bits per pixel (bpp) and good visual quality measured by peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR). However, the embedding capacity and visual quality of this method can be significantly improved. Thus, we propose a simple reversible steganographic scheme in spatial domain for digital images by using the multiple embedding strategy. The proposed method horizontally and vertically embeds one secret bit into one cover pixel pair. The experimental results show that the proposed reversible steganographic method achieves good visual quality and high embedding capacity. Specifically, with the one-layer embedding, the proposed method can obtain the embedding capacity of more than 0.5 bpp and the PSNR value greater than 54 dB for all test images. Especially, with the five-layer embedding, the proposed method has the embedding capacity of more than 2 bpp and the PSNR value higher than 52 dB for all test images. Therefore, the proposed method surpasses many existing reversible data embedding methods in terms of visual quality and embedding capacity.