Innovative Multi-Level Secure Steganographic Scheme based on Pixel Value Difference

Abstract

Steganography is one of the branches of information security field, it aims to hide information in unremarkable cover media so as not to arouse an eavesdropper’s suspicion. The secret message is hidden in such a way that no significant degradation can be detected in the quality of the original image. The aim of this paper is to introduce an efficient steganographic scheme to hide data over gray scale images. This scheme is based on the property of the human eye, which is more sensitive to the change in the smooth area than the edge area using pixel value difference, besides employing the LSB substitution technique as a fundamental stage. The experimental results show that the proposed method could successfully achieve the goals of the high embedding capacity and maintaining the visual quality, in addition, provides more secure data hiding using selective pixel positions determined by a secret image (i.e. key). Moreover, based on that, the secret message is replaced with dynamic LSBs, our scheme can effectively resist several image steganalysis techniques.