Improving the Adaptive Steganographic Methods Based on Modulus Function

This letter improves two adaptive steganographic methods in Refs. [5], [6], which utilize the remainders of two consecutive pixels to record the information of secret data. Through analysis, we point out that they perform mistakenly under some conditions, and the recipient cannot extract the secret data exactly. We correct these by enlarging the adjusting range of the remainders of two consecutive pixels within the block in the embedding procedure. Furthermore, the readjusting phase in Ref. [6] is improved by allowing every two-pixel block to be fully modified, and then the sender can select the best choice that introduces the smallest embedding distortion. Experimental results show that the improved method not only extracts secret data exactly but also reduces the embedding distortion. key words: steganography, adaptive steganographic methods, pixel-value differencing, modulus function