A Steganographic Method for Digital Images by Multi-Pixel Differencing

Abstract

In order to provide large embedding capacity and to minimize distortion for the stego-image, a steganographic method using multi-pixel differencing is presented in this paper. We propose a method which is based on pixel-value differencing. We use neighboring pixels correlation to estimate the degree of smoothness or contrast of pixels. If pixels are located in edge area, then they may be embedded with larger capacity than that in smooth area. In order to improve the embedding capacity and reduce the distortion, multi-pixel differencing and pixel-value shifting are proposed in this paper. The experimental results show that our method provides a large embedding capacity without making noticeable distortion.