An Image Steganographic Scheme Based on Edge Detection and Least Significant Bit Substitution

This work presents a steganographic scheme based on Laplacian-of-Gaussian (LoG) edge detection and least significant bit (LSB) substitution. The cover image is first divided into continuous and non-overlapping 4×4-pixel blocks. The pixel at the top left corner of each block (first pixel) is defined as the reference pixel. After the LoG edge detection, the blocks are classified as edge or non-edge blocks, and this information is embedded in the reference pixels. Each non-reference pixel is then embedded with 5 bits and 4 bits of cipher text if it belongs to an edge block or non-edge block, respectively. Compared to the method of Tseng and Leng, Bai et al., and Ghosal et al., proposed method increased the capacity by 39.6%, 7.3%, and 42.7%, respectively, in the “Lena” cover image. To test the generalizability of our method, an embedding capacity and image quality test were conducted using 10,000 512 × 512 sized greyscale images from the BOSSBase dataset. Compared to the aforementioned previous methods, our method improved the capacity by 33.9%, 2.7%, and 36.1%, respectively, while maintaining an acceptable stego-image quality. Finally, proposed method can resist the detection of RS, pixel difference histogram analysis and second order SPAM features.