A Novel Steganographic Method with Four-Pixel Differencing and Exploiting Modification Direction

Xin LIAO  Qiaoyan WEN  Jie ZHANG 

Publication
IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Fundamentals of Electronics, Communications and Computer Sciences  Vol.E95-A  No.7  pp.1189-1192
Publication Date: 2012/07/01
Online ISSN: 1745-1337
Print ISSN: 0916-8508
Type of Manuscript: LETTER
Category: Cryptography and Information Security
Keyword: 
steganography,  human visual system (HVS),  four-pixel differencing,  exploiting modification direction, 

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Summary: 
In this letter, a novel steganographic method with four-pixel differencing and exploiting modification direction is proposed. Secret data are embedded into each four-pixel block by adaptively applying exploiting modification direction technique. The difference value of the four-pixel block is used to judge whether the pixels in edge areas can tolerate larger changes than those in smooth areas. The readjustment guarantees to extract the secret data exactly and to minimize the embedding distortion. Since the proposed method processes non-overlapping 22 pixels blocks instead of two consecutive pixels, the features of edge can be considered sufficiently. Compared with the previous method, experimental results show that the proposed method provides better performance, i.e., larger embedding capacity and better image quality.