A more secure steganography based on adaptive pixel-value ...

Multimed Tools Appl(a) Adaptive-edge method(b) Our proposed method with T = 4Fig. 2 Illustration of the difference between the stego images using adaptive-edge approach [24]andour proposed method with the same embedding capacity of 70% bpp. For display purpose, we showsthe contour lines of the zoom-in smooth region in the stego using Matlab with default settings. It canbe clearly seen that many local minimal/maximal regions appear after using adaptive-edge approach,which will lead to noise-like blocking effects in the corresponding positions. While our method canleave those regions as they are in the cover image. Example: NRCSMI01029 in NRCS database,Zoom-in location: (96 : 125, 701 : 740)security evaluation, we employ the same image subset as shown in the table for allthe <strong>steganography</strong> approaches for a fair comparison environment.4.3 Objective qualityIn above subsection, we show that our proposed method can embed most secretbits into edge regions adaptively, and will not produce noise-like blocking artifactsin those smooth regions. Therefore, the subjective quality of the stego images is