An adaptive multi bit-plane image steganography using block data-hiding

Abstract

Embedding a secret message into the pixels of a cover image yields a visual distortion if these pixels belong to smooth regions. Thus, this prompted the development of some edge-based approaches in which only the edge pixels are used to hide secret bits. As a result, the visual quality of stego images is improved. However, the capacity is limited due to some unused regions in cover images. In this paper, an adaptive multi bit-planes image steganography using block data-hiding (MPBDH) is proposed. This method employs more than one bit-plane and applies an adaptive complexity threshold computation to select the complex regions of a cover image used in data hiding. Consequently, the embedding capacity and security performance are significantly improved in comparison with previous approaches based on pixel and block complexity. The results, which are obtained from experiments performed on 10,000 natural gray-images, indicate that the embedding capacity and security introduced in the proposed approach overcome the problems of previous approaches. The proposed approach is hence suitable for secure communications.