A novel approach for edge adaptive steganography on LSB insertion technique

Abstract

Steganography is define as the process of hiding information in a multimedia carrier. Its ultimate objectives are undetectability and robustness of the hidden data. Least significant bit technique is one of the popular techniques in steganography. Least significant bits of cover are altered by the secret data bits. Changing the LSB's of pixels in smooth regions in the cover image at lower embedding rate will forms the poor visual quality and asymmetry into the stegos. Instead of using smooth regions, edge regions from the cover are selected for data embedding purpose. This novel approach of steganography expand the LSB matching revisited image steganography and propose a new scheme which can select the embedding regions according to the size of secret message and the difference between two consecutive pixels in the cover image. In case of lower embedding rates, only sharper edge regions are used while keeping the other smoother regions as they are. This novel scheme can enhance the security significantly compared with typical LSB based approaches as well as their edge adaptive ones, such as pixel value differencing based approaches, while maintaining excellent visual quality of stego images at the same time.