Elevating Image Steganography:A Fusion of MSB Matching and LSB Substitution for Enhanced Concealment Capabilities

In today’s rapidly evolving landscape of communication technologies,ensuring the secure delivery of sensitive data has become an essential priority.To overcome these difficulties,different steganography and data encryption methods have been proposed by researchers to secure communications.Most of the proposed steganography techniques achieve higher embedding capacities without compromising visual imperceptibility using LSB substitution.In this work,we have an approach that utilizes a combinationofMost SignificantBit(MSB)matching andLeast Significant Bit(LSB)substitution.The proposed algorithm divides confidential messages into pairs of bits and connects them with the MSBs of individual pixels using pair matching,enabling the storage of 6 bits in one pixel by modifying a maximum of three bits.The proposed technique is evaluated using embedding capacity and Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio(PSNR)score,we compared our work with the Zakariya scheme the results showed a significant increase in data concealment capacity.The achieved results of ourwork showthat our algorithmdemonstrates an improvement in hiding capacity from11%to 22%for different data samples while maintaining a minimumPeak Signal-to-Noise Ratio(PSNR)of 37 dB.These findings highlight the effectiveness and trustworthiness of the proposed algorithm in securing the communication process and maintaining visual integrity.

High capacity reversible data hiding in encrypted images based on adaptive quadtree partitioning and MSB prediction

To improve the embedding capacity of reversible data hiding in encrypted images(RDH-EI),a new RDH-EI scheme is proposed based on adaptive quadtree partitioning and most significant bit(MSB)prediction.First,according to the smoothness of the image,the image is partitioned into blocks based on adaptive quadtree partitioning,and then blocks of different sizes are encrypted and scrambled at the block level to resist the analysis of the encrypted images.In the data embedding stage,the adaptive MSB prediction method proposed by Wang and He(2022)is improved by taking the upper-left pixel in the block as the target pixel,to predict other pixels to free up more embedding space.To the best of our knowledge,quadtree partitioning is first applied to RDH-EI.Simulation results show that the proposed method is reversible and separable,and that its average embedding capacity is improved.For gray images with a size of 512×512,the average embedding capacity is increased by 25565 bits.For all smooth images with improved embedding capacity,the average embedding capacity is increased by about 35530 bits.