Highly imperceptible data hiding technique using MSB in the grayscale image

Abstract

Security of confidential information during communication in the network has been the primary concern. Therefore, data hiding techniques have become the focal point among the researchers. In this regard, to keep the communication secret, watermarking and steganography are the two most important fields of data concealing. Image steganography techniques embed the secret data bits in the image's pixels to detour attention of outsiders. In this paper, an improved data hiding technique is proposed using the XOR features of the cover image (CI) pixels to conceal the secret data bits in the least significant bit (LSB). During embedding, the most significant bits (MSBs) of the pixels are partitioned into two different segments. Next, using these segments and the embedding bits, the stego-image pixels are obtained. The comparative analysis is done with various image steganography techniques to demonstrate that the proposed work offers better imperceptibility and capacity.