An Advanced Least-Significant-Bit Embedding Scheme for Steganographic Encoding

The advantages of Least-Significant-Bit (LSB) steganographic data embedding are that it is simple to understand, easy to implement, and it results in stego-images that contain hidden data yet appear to be of high visual fidelity. However, it can be shown that under certain conditions, LSB embedding is not secure at all. The fatal drawback of LSB embedding is the existence of detectable artifacts in the form of pairs of values (PoVs). The goals of this paper are to present a theoretic analysis of PoVs and to propose an advanced LSB embedding scheme that possesses the advantages of LSB embedding suggested above, but which also provides an additional level of communication security. The proposed scheme breaks the regular pattern of PoVs in the histogram domain, increasing the difficulty of steganalysis and thereby raising the level of security. The experimental results show that both the Chi-square index and RS index are less than 0.1, i.e., the hidden message is undetectable by the well-known Chi-square and RS steganalysis attacks.