Steganography using more surrounding pixels

Abstract

Nowadays among the steganography techniques and particularly in conventional least significant bit (LSB) insertion method, there is a challenging issue and that is how to embed the secret bits in a medium like a typical 8-bit gray scale image in a way to be hidden to the human vision system. The gray scale image is called Cover Image and the pixels that carry the secret bits are called Target Pixels. The considerable point is how the capacity of every target pixel is achieved in order to maintain an acceptable imperceptibility of the secret data. The number of bits embedded in each target pixel is called Capacity. Some methods utilize either three or four adjacent neighbors of a target pixel so as to find its capacity such as BPCS, PVD and MBNS. In this paper, a method is proposed that uses at least four numbers of eight surrounding pixels of a target pixel. The more pixels are used for estimating the capacity, the higher image quality is achieved and vice versa. Thanks to this fact, smaller image’s distortion is made in the cover image. The method is called MSPU that stands for more surrounding pixels using.