A New Secure Steganographic Method Based on Predictive Coding and Quantization Index Modulation

Steganography is a branch in the information hiding research area which aims to conceal data transmission between two parties. In this paper a new method based on predictive coding is proposed which employs Quantization Index Modulation (QIM) for quantizing error values and embedding data simultaneously. Furthermore, a correction mechanism is proposed to preserve the histogram of the cover image and make it resistant against histogram-based attacks. To evaluate the performance of the proposed method, several experiments on gray-level images are carried out and compared with two prominent methods called Jsteg and Steganography Based on Predictive Coding (SBPC). The experimental results show that the proposed method achieves an efficient trade-off among imperceptibility, hiding capacity, compression ratio and robustness against malicious attacks.