A Novel Steganographic Method for Gray-Level Images

Abstract — In this work we propose a novel Steganographic method for hiding information within the spatial domain of the gray scale image. The proposed approach works by dividing the cover into blocks of equal sizes and then embeds the message in the edge of the block depending on the number of ones in left four bits of the pixel. The proposed approach is tested on a database consists of 100 different images. Experimental results, compared with other methods, showed that the proposed approach hide more large information and gave a good visual quality stego-image that can be seen by human eyes. Keywords — Data Embedding, Cryptography, Watermarking, Steganography, Least Significant Bit, Information Hiding. I. INTRODUCTION ATA hiding became an important field as the use of the Internet became popular. Data hiding is a young field and it is growing in an exponential rate [1],[2]. Steganography is used to hide information inside other. As derived from Greek, the word steganography literally means “Covered Writing”. Steganography is the art and science of communicating in a way, which hides the existence of the communication, or it is the art of hiding information in ways that prevent the detection of hidden messages [3]. The main purpose of steganography is to hide a message in another one in a way that prevents any attacker to detect or notice the hidden message. The aim of this work is to develop a new method for hiding message in gray-scale images, mainly embedding text data in digital images. In this work we present an efficient Steganographic approach for hiding information within a gray scale image. We have compared the new method with two well-known methods, PVD and GLM methods. Our results show the effectiveness of the proposed method compared with the other methods. The rest of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2 introduces some important issues of Steganography and Data Hiding Methods. Section 3 discuses related work in the field of data hiding. Methods and materials are discussed in Section 4. Section 5 introduces the experimental results of the proposed method. Conclusions and future work are presented in section 6.