A novel scheme for random sequential high-capacity data hiding based on PVD and LSB

Information hiding is to protect the security of secret information during transmission. This paper proposes a random sequential high-capacity hiding scheme based on pixel value difference (PVD) and least significant bit (LSB), which can maintain a good image quality and extract data accurately. Firstly, the image is divided into 2x2 blocks. A random sequence is generated to determine the embedding order and the first pixel in block is selected as the reference pixel. Secondly, the LSB substitution is applied to the reference pixel. A hybrid method of PVD and LSB is utilized to embed the remaining pixels. Calculate the difference between the remaining pixels and the reference pixel to determine the embedding bits according to the difference range table. Finally, the embedded pixels are adjusted to ensure that the differences before and after embedding are within the same range. The experiment compared the embedding capacity (EC), peak signal-noise ratio and structure similarity index with other schemes, demonstrating that this scheme achieved good visual quality while increasing capacity. The experiment results demonstrate that the proposed method has high EC (930,312 bits) and good visual quality (35.51 dB). In addition, the proposed scheme has shown excellent resistance ability to salt-and-pepper noise, regular and singular analysis, pixel difference histogram analysis, and subtractive pixel adjacency matrix steganalysis.