Abstract
Pixel value differencing (PVD) and least significant bit substitution (LSB) are two widely used schemes in image steganography. These two methods do not consider different content in a cover image for hiding the secret data. The content of most digital images has different edge directions in each pixel, and the local object shape or appearance is mostly characterized by the distribution of its intensity gradients or edge directions. Exploiting these characteristics for embedding various secret information in different edge directions will eliminate sequential embedding and improve robustness. Thus, a histogram of oriented gradient (HOG) algorithm is proposed to find the dominant edge direction for each $2\times 2$ block of cover images. Blocks of interest (BOIs) are determined adaptively based on the gradient magnitude and angle of the cover image. Then, the PVD algorithm is used to hide secret data in the dominant edge direction, while the LSB substitution is utilized in the other two remaining pixels. Extensive experiments using various standard images reveal that the proposed scheme provides high embedding capacity and better visual quality compared with several other PVD- and LSB-based methods. Moreover, it resists various steganalysis techniques, such as pixel difference histogram and RS analysis.
Highlights
Information hiding has been considered one of the most important issues in human communities because of the increased and urgent demand for data transmission over social networks
This paper proposes a new adaptive steganography method for grayscale images based on finding a set of blocks of interest (BOI) to hide secret data bits in their dominant edge directions
In this paper, an adaptive data hiding method using a histogram of oriented gradient (HOG) is proposed for embedding secret data into digital images based on Pixel value differencing (PVD)-least significant bit (LSB) techniques
Summary
Information hiding has been considered one of the most important issues in human communities because of the increased and urgent demand for data transmission over social networks. The common use of the Internet and cloud services in transmission of a large amount of data over open networks and insecure channels exposes private and secret data to serious situations [1]. From the transmitted information, a variety of data hiding schemes have been introduced [3]; steganography is one of them [4], [5]. Steganography is a mechanism for covert communication that aims to hide secret messages into an ordinary message without drawing suspicion or achieving the least possible statistical detectability. Steganography techniques can be applied for hiding secret information on various types of digital media, such as images, video and audio data, and text [6]
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