A Modified Least Significant Bit Embedding with Error Correction

Abstract

This paper proposes a modified Least significant bit (LSB) embedding capable of both a high embedding payload and error correction. The method proposed in this paper combines the techniques of both LSB embedding and multilevel coding to produce stego images with error correction capability and high embedding payloads. The proposed method divides cover work into multiple blocks, and each LSB for all the pixels in each block is considered a layer. Reed-Muller codes are used to encode cipher and embed data into every layer. LSB embedding has no inherent capability to correct errors in cipher extraction, but the proposed method can correct some errors according to the error correction capability of multilevel coding. Compared with LSB embedding, simulation results show that the proposed method has a similar peak signal noise ratio (PSNR) and embedding payload. The peak signal noise ratio (PSNR) exceeds 40 dB by using our proposed method. Additionally, our proposed method offers significantly superior embedding payloads and error correction capabilities.