A High-Capacity Image Steganography Method Using Chaotic Particle Swarm Optimization

Abstract

Image steganography has been widely adopted to protect confidential data. Researchers have been seeking to improve the steganographic techniques in order to increase the embedding capacity while preserving the stego-image quality. In this paper, we propose a steganography method using particle swarm optimization and chaos theory aiming at finding the best pixel locations in the cover image to hide the secret data while maintaining the quality of the resultant stego-image. To enhance the embedding capacity, the host and secret images are divided into blocks and each block stores an appropriate amount of secret bits. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme outperforms existing methods in terms of the PSNR and SSIM image quality metrics.