A large capacity steganography using color BMP images

Abstract

A new steganography (information hiding technique) is proposed. It uses a color image as the information hiding dummy image, i.e., the container, or carrier of the secret information. This new technique is not based on a programming technique, but is based on a property of human vision system such that human eyes are blind to very complex binary patterns. In other word, human can not see the effect of the data change, even if the “noise-like” portions in the bit-planes of a multi-valued image are all changed to other noise-like patterns. In order to assure this property, we made a replacement experiment of noise-like portions of a color photo with random binary patterns, and it turned out in a surprising result. This human vision property is the key to the large capacity steganography which uses a color image in a BMP file format. This new technique may open a new step to an internet communication age.