A block based data hiding method in images using pixel value differencing and LSB substitution method

Abstract

Information hiding is a historical but on demand fascinating research area. Now, in today's world, the availability of information has become so easy that the security and insecurity of information goes side by side. In order to provide security of information a science called, Steganography has emerged. Steganography conceals the existence of information into images to formulate a secure communication. In this paper, a Steganographic method based on Pixel Value Differencing (PVD) and LSB Substitution method is proposed. To meet the increasing demand for privacy and secrecy the method focused mainly on making it a robust, secured technique of information hiding. An efficient and dynamic embedding algorithm is proposed in this paper that not only hides the secret data with an imperceptible visual quality and increased capacity but also make secret code breaking a good annoyance for the attacker. This method also represents an extraction algorithm that effectively extracts the entire secret message without any loss of a single data. Finally, experimental results show that, the proposed method achieves an increased embedding capacity and lower image degradation with improved security as compared to LSB substitution method and some recent existing methods of data hiding.