A Low Distortion Data Hiding Method

Abstract

Data transferred on the Internet consists of many packets. Anyone with a working knowledge of network operation mechanisms and has the ability to capture packet data can decode it and intercept data. Suffice to say, there is a lack of data privacy on the Internet, and this issue has driven researchers to propose information hiding methods. The information hiding method, Steganography, embeds secret data into a cover image to evade detection and maintain privacy between the sender and receiver. This paper makes use of the property of (5,3) linear code to propose a method of hiding data. The scheme embeds 1 bit of a secret per pixel and the average distortion is 0.3438, with PSNR is 52.7677. The distortion of the proposed methods is better than the LSB substitution method with a distortion of 0.5.