A data hiding algorithm based on histogram re-quantization

Abstract

Steganography, a technique of data hiding, is becoming more and more significant with expansion of the Internet communication. As a result, various steganographic algorithms have been proposed in recent years, for example, Ni et al. have carried out a lossless data-hiding algorithm based on the histogram modification. In order to reinforce more security and more data embedding capacity, this paper extends the Ni's algorithm with a random permutation and a histogram re-quantization. To begin with, applying a random permutation, the security is not easy to be broken by a brute-force attack. In addition, the embedding capacity is able to be strengthened approximately 3 times by adopting a histogram re-quantization. As to our approach, it is visually indistinguishable between a cover image and a stegoimage with a large embedding capacity.