Block Mean Modulation: An Effective and Robust Image Steganographic Technique in the Spatial Domain

Image steganography is one of the emerging techniques for secret communication in the digital age. In order to have effective secret communication through image steganography, data hiding must be robust to image transformations and effective against analysis techniques. This paper proposes a novel spatial domain data hiding technique in which the secret message is embedded in the quantized mean of image blocks. The experimental results show that the message is preserved after applying common image modifications including jpeg compression, resizing and additive noise to some extent. The block size and quantization factor are optimized through trial and error. The mean of the intensity values in a block is the same as the DC coefficient of the DCT of the block. The effectiveness against common steganalysis methods is also established.