An efficient steganographic technique for hiding data

Steganography is the technique for hiding data and aims to hide data in such a way that any eavesdropper cannot observe any changes in the original media. The least significant bit (LSB) is one of the most public techniques in steganography. The classical technique is LSB substitution. The main idea of this technique is to directly alter some LSB of the cover image with the secret data. The essential drawback of the available LSB techniques is that increasing the capacity of the stego image leads to decreasing its quality. Therefore, the goal of the proposed method is to enhance the capacity taking high visual quality into consideration. To achieve this goal, some LSB of the cover image are inverted depending on the secret data for embedding instead of replacing LSB with the secret data. First, the maximum and minimum values in the secret data are determined then subtract all values of the secret data from this maximum value. Finally, make a division for the results and embed the new results into the cover image to obtain the stego image. The results show that the proposed method gives high capacity and good imperceptibility in comparison with the previous methods.