High payload steganography mechanism using hybrid edge detector

Steganography is the art and science of hiding data into information. The secret message is hidden in such a way that no one can apart from the sender or the intended recipient. The least significant bit (LSB) substitution mechanism is the most common steganographic technique for embedding a secret message in an image with high capacity, while the human visual system (HVS) would be unable to notice the hidden message in the cover image. in this paper, besides employing the LSB substitution technique as a fundamental stage, we take advantage of edge detection technique. The experimental results show that the proposed scheme not only achieves high embedding capacity but also enhances the quality of the stego image from the HVS by an edge detection technique. Moreover, based on that the secret message is replaced with different LSBs, our scheme can effectively resist the image steganalysis. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.