An adaptive steganographic method based on the measurement of just noticeable distortion profile

This paper presents an adaptive steganographic method based on just noticeable distortion (JND) profile measurement. According to the input requirements, our method can produce a higher quality or higher embedding capacity stego-image. In the embedding secret data bits into a target pixel process, four different impact factors are utilized to compute how much information can be embedded and what the stego-pixel value will be. These are difference values that represent the correlation between neighboring pixels, the JND value of the target pixel, a predefined embedding capacity control factor, and the contents of various lengths secret data bits. The proposed method embeds more secret data bits within complex areas and less data bits in smooth areas. The difference between the target pixel and the stego-pixel values is controlled, as far as possible, to less than or equal to the JND value of the target pixel. Thus, the stego-image maintains good imperceptible property. In the extraction phase, the embedded secret data can be extracted from the stego-image without referencing the original image and the JND profile. The experimental results show that our method improves stego-image quality and conspicuously increases the embedding capacity at the same time.