Binary image steganography based on permutation

Abstract

Gray and color images contain much space for hiding information, and modification of pixel values within a certain range does not cause the image to appear abnormal. However, pixels in binary images possess only two states: black and white. As a result, distortions of binary images can be easily detected. For this reason, hiding information in binary images is more challenging. In this paper, we propose a steganographic scheme based on permutations, which improves the capacity of embedding information in a series of p host binary images. Consider a steganographic scheme T that can hide $$p\times Q(m, n)$$ bits of data in p binary images, where Q(m, n) represents the embedding capacity of T for an $$m\times n$$ binary image block. Our scheme takes advantage of permutation to improve this capacity for p binary images so that, instead of $$p\times Q(m, n)$$ bits, it can hide $$p \times \left\lfloor \log _2(p) \right\rfloor + p\times Q(m, n)$$ bits. The results obtained by experiments show that our model performs a better hiding process in terms of hiding capacity.