Reversible-Enhanced Stego Block Chaining Image Steganography: A Highly Efficient Data Hiding Technique

Abstract

The secure exchange of secret information is one of the most important challenges in the era of modern communication. To address the issue and establish secure communication, various techniques have been developed. Transmitting secret information in a hidden manner is one of the numerous possible solutions. It can be used to transmit secret information, hidden in other media called cover medium. However, this increases the amount of transmittable data and bandwidth requirements. The work proposed technique is an effort to hide secret information in a cover medium to achieve secure communication, reduce the bandwidth requirement, and ensure the retrieval of secret information in full-strength. The proposed data hiding technique has a high data hiding capacity (HC), provides a high level of security, and results in high-quality stego images. The proposed technique, reversible-enhanced stego block chaining (RESBC), has demonstrated very good results as compared to the state-of-the-art steganography techniques. The RESBC successfully solves the data rate requirement of SBC. It has an improved security level of secret information as compared to the 4-least significant bits (4LSB) steganography. The RESBC has solved the problem of information recovery, associated with ESBC and ensures full health recovery.