Image steganography with block entropy based segmentation and variable rate embedding

Abstract

Steganography is the art and science of concealing information inside apparently innocuous covers like images, audio and video such that the very existence of the hidden message remains imperceptible to an adversary. Image steganography has numerous implementations developed over time. It is evident that certain areas in the image are more efficient for hiding data than the others. Such regions are called Regions of Interest. This paper proposes an object based image steganography technique that utilizes image entropy to segment smooth and textured areas in a cover image and then embed data with a variable data rate high efficiency embedding scheme. The method is shown to yield promising results in terms of stego-image fidelity and statistical imperceptibility.