Abstract

Providing protection to secret information has been given high importance and has received increasing attention from the information technology community. In this paper, we propose a new approach for information hiding based on gray-scale digital images which considers the threshold of the pixel of an image while hiding the bits of a secret message in its least-significant-bits (LSBs). The proposed method works on the secret message by converting it into a stream of bits. Then we generate pseudo random numbers to provide a random distribution of the secret bits across the image. We use m-least significant bits of an 8-bit pixel to hold the secret bits. The value of m varies depending on the threshold of the pixels. The number of bits (m) to be embedded in a pixel having small threshold is more than that of a pixel having high or medium threshold. When we consider low and high thresholds we simply replace the m-least significant bits of a pixel with the m-secret bits. For medium threshold category pixels we use exclusive-or (XOR) of m-least significant bits of the pixel with the m-secret bits. The experimental results show that the proposed scheme achieves high embedding capacity and good visual quality of stego images for m=3 and m=2 for low and non-low thresholds respectively.

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