A Secure and High-Capacity Data-Hiding Method Using Compression, Encryption and Optimized Pixel Value Differencing

A high capacity data hiding method using lossless compression, advanced encryption standard (AES), modified pixel value differencing (MPVD), and least significant bit (LSB) substitution is presented. Arithmetic coding was applied on a secret message for the lossless compression, which provided ~22% higher embedding capacity. The compressed secret message is subjected to AES encryption; this provides higher security in the cases of steganalysis attacks. After compression and encryption, the LSB substitution and MPVD are applied. In MPVD, the adaptive non-overlapping $3\times 3$ pixel blocks or a combination of $3\times 3$ and $2\times 2$ blocks are used in raster fashion. It is experimentally established that with the proposed method, significant enhancement in embedding capacity was achieved and 214 132 extra bits than existing methods could be embedded due to the use of arithmetic compression and MPVD. The MPVD and arithmetic coding together resulted into 25% enhanced embedding capacity than the earlier methods. The proposed method also provides high levels of visual quality with an average of 36.38 dB at 4.00 bpp. The proposed method is also proved to be secure against regular/singular (RS) steganalysis.