Visual fidelity without sacrificing capacity: an adaptive Laplacian pyramid approach to information hiding

Abstract

This paper investigates the improvements in hiding capacity and perceptibility of image-based steganography using a hiding scheme which utilizes a multiscale Laplacian pyramid of the cover image and the discrete cosine transform (DCT). The proposed methodology allows for an enhanced visual quality of the resulting stego image, while allowing for very high embedding payload capacities, which improves security by reducing an eavesdropper’s ability to detect and successively extract or change the hidden information. The basic idea is to hide the secret data in the DCT of the lowest level of the Laplacian pyramid of the cover image. This scheme employs a curve-fitting adaptive region approach in the DCT domain for enhanced visual fidelity as well as very high capacities as compared to competing methods. This paper also compares the embedding capacities of various steganography schemes that have been recently published in the literature. Experimental results confirm that the proposed hiding scheme can maintain consistently high stego image quality, in comparison to other spatial and frequency-domain schemes, when hiding at extremely high payload capacities.