A data hiding technique based on magic squares

Steganography, the study of invisible communication, deals with ways of hiding the existence of the communicated data in unsuspected digital media, such that it remains confidential. The objectives to be considered in the steganography methods are high capacity, imperceptibility and robustness. In this paper, a new data hiding scheme based on magic square blocks is proposed to obtain better image quality and higher embedding capacity while scrambling the secret image using magic square provides security. In the proposed method, a secret digit is embedded into each cover pixel pair with the help of a reference matrix consisting of connected magic square blocks. The experimental results evaluated on 6 cover images show that the new scheme can enhance the security significantly compared with other spatial domain based approaches preserving higher visual quality of stego images at the same time.