An Efficient Approach to Information Hiding Through Image Steganography using Edge Detection

Abstract

Least Significant Bit (LSB) substitution is the most popular information hiding scheme in spatial steganography. Its popularity lies in the fact that it has very little effect on the cover image and secret message can remain largely unidentified by the human eye, hence, making information exchange more secure. LSB substitution can be further optimised by combining it with edge detection techniques. This is because different regions in cover image can store different number of bits. Complex regions or regions having an edge are less sensitive to change and can hide more data than smooth regions. In this research, a steganographic approach is proposed that combines edge detection based steganographic techniques with Optimal Pixel Adjustment Process (OPAP). Through experiments it is demonstrated that proposed method leads to better image quality at high payloads than even some of the state-of-the-art high capacity steganographic methods. It is also shown that proposed method can have embedding rates up to 3.407 bpp at PSNR value of 35dB, which can't be discerned by the Human Visual System (HVS). This is greater than any other method in literature.