Steganography in Digital Images Using Maximum Difference of Neighboring Pixel Values

Abstract

In this paper a pixel value differencing steganography based on the maximum difference of the neighboring pixel values have been proposed. There are four variants such as five, six, seven and eight neighbor differencing. In five neighbor differencing method the maximum difference amongst the five neighboring pixels such as upper, left, right, bottom and upperright corner are used to take embedding decision. In six neighbor differencing method the maximum difference amongst the six neighboring pixels such as upper, left, right, bottom, upper-right corner, and upper-left corner are used to take embedding decision. In seven neighbor differencing method the maximum difference amongst the seven neighboring pixels such as upper, left, right, bottom, upper-right corner, upper-left corner and bottom-left corner are used to take embedding decision. In eight neighbor differencing method the maximum difference amongst all the eight neighboring pixels are used to take embedding decision. The message extraction process is very simple and does not require any knowledge of the original image. The experimental results show that the distortion is the minimum in five neighbor differencing. But the theoretical studies reveal that the hiding capacity is the highest in eight neighbor differencing.