Image steganographic method based on pencil-shaped pattern

Abstract

Image Steganography is a covert communication to hide the existence of messages into images from a third party. High embedding capacity, good visual quality and security are three significant essentials. In the proposed method, every secret digit is embedded into each cover pixel pair based on a magic matrix with pencil-shaped patterns to obtain higher embedding capacity while preserving good image quality. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme ensures higher embedding capacity of 2 bits per pixel and PSNR of 44.7 dB on average compared with existing schemes, while ensuring security by scrambling the secret message with a secure key.