Adaptive pixel swapping based steganography reducing embedding noise

Abstract

In this paper, a block based steganographic algorithm is proposed where embedding is done by swapping two pixels within the block such that resulting additive noise can be adaptively controlled by using a prescribed threshold. The proposed algorithm is used to reduce the extra additive noise which is the main drawback of a existing PSSA algorithm [6]. Regarding the steganographic security, the proposed steganographic scheme inherently preserves first order image statistics such as image histogram and thus remains undetectable against any histogram based spatial domain steganalytic attacks. Experimental results show that the proposed adaptive scheme clearly outperforms the PSSA algorithm [6] against additive noise based blind attacks. © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.