An Improved Steganography Method Based on Least-Significant-Bit Substitution and Pixel-Value Differencing

Abstract

This research was based on the study conducted by Khodaei et al. (2012), namely, the least-significant-bit (LSB) substitution combined with the pixel-value differencing (PVD) steganography, and presented an improved irreversible image steganography method. Such a method was developed through integrating the improved LSB substitution with the modulus function-based PVD steganography to increase steganographic capacity of the original technique while maintaining the quality of images. It partitions the cover image into non-overlapped blocks, each of which consists of 3 consecutive pixels. The 2nd pixel represents the base, in which secret data are embedded by using the 3-bit LSB substitution. Each of the other 2 pixels is paired with the base respectively for embedding secret data by using an improved modulus PVD method. The experiment results showed that the method can greatly increase steganographic capacity in comparison with other PVD-based techniques (by a maximum amount of 135%), on the premise that the quality of images is maintained. Last but not least, 2 security analyses, the pixel difference histogram (PDH) and the content-selective residual (CSR) steganalysis were performed. The results indicated that the method is capable of preventing the detection of the 2 common techniques.