A steganographic approach to hide secret data in digital audio based on XOR operands triplet property with high embedding rate and good quality audio

In this paper, a unique and transparent data hiding algorithm based on XOR operands triplet (XOT) is proposed. In XOT, an XOR operation applied on any two members of a triplet provides the third member of the same triplet. Taking advantage of the low computational complexity and fascinating properties of the XOR operator, it is possible to embed 4-ary secret digits with negligible changes in the host digital audio. The proposed scheme has been designed to ensure that a minimum number of bit alterations happen in the host digital audio during the data hiding process, which also increases the security of the scheme and provides high quality embedded audio without compromising the statistical property of host audio signals. The scheme confirms that the maximum change is less than 12.5% of the digital audio samples and the average error for the individual digital audio sample is less than 6.25%. The experimental results show that the scheme has a high capacity (88 kbps) without perceptual distortion (objective difference grades are 0.1 to 0.31) and provides robustness against intentional or unintentional attack detection. Comparative analysis shows that our method has better performance than data hiding techniques reported recently in terms of imperceptibility, capacity, and security.