AN EFFICIENT ALGORITHMIC SOLUTION FOR HIGH PAYLOAD GOOD IMPERCEPTIBILITY HYBRID IMAGE STEGANOGRAPHY

Abstract

A hybrid steganographic technique has been proposed to enlarge the size of secret message and to hide several images in one cover image. Initially, the secret images were compressed using JPEG 2000 before embedding them to the cover image. Second least significant bit plane of cover image was entirely replaced by secret message while tri-ways-pixel-value-differencing (TPVD) was used to hide secret message in remaining seven-bit cover image. The quality of stego image was enhanced by residual image coding (RIC). The cover image was divided in four sub-images, three of them provided cover for secret message using proposed technique while fourth sub-image was used to embed RIC of stego image using only TPVD, to ensure better quality in terms of peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR). Proposed technique provided the opportunity to transmit secret data without detection by different steganalysis techniques like dual statistics steganalysis. Experimental results verified that proposed technique achieved high payload with better image quality than TPVD scheme.