A secure image steganography based on modified matrix encoding using the adaptive region selection technique

This paper introduced an image steganography technique based on modified matrix encoding to enhance the perceptual quality of the stego images. Additionally, more pixel bit-planes are exploited in the data hiding process to improve the embedding capacity. The number of used image layers depends on the size of the given secret message and the texture characteristic of the cover image. The complexity of the pixel block is identified by the difference between the middle pixel and its neighbors. By performing the suitable embedding solutions of modified matrix encoding, the complexity is unchanged by the data hiding stage. Therefore, the used image regions could be determined precisely in the extraction process without using any additional information. The experimental results proved that the stego images created by the proposed approach achieved higher security against statistical and visual steganalysis techniques than the previous methods. The improvement of the security against detection by Ensemble Classifier is four times as secure as the best security performance of the existing methods.