Improved Steganographic Embedding Exploiting Modification Direction in Multimedia Communications

Steganography provides secure communications over the Internet with a cover image. However, it is difficult to transfer many messages with small-sized images. We have improved EMD (Exploiting Modification Direction), proposed by Zhang and Wang, to solve this problem. In this paper, we have developed a (2 n + 2-1)-ary scheme. Our scheme shows a higher embedding rate, R=log2(2 n + 2-1)/n, which is greater than that of the EMD scheme, because the EMD scheme embedding rate is R=log2(2n+1)/n, for n>=2. The experimental results show that our scheme is able to embed twice as many secret bits in multimedia communications compared to the existing EMD embedding method. Our method has low complexity and achieves higher embedding performance with good perceptual quality against the earlier arts. An experiment verified our proposed data hiding method in multimedia communications.

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