Pixel selection based on the difference between secret message and cover image pixel for efficient information hiding

Abstract

In the new Steganographic technique, hiding is based on the difference between the secret message value and the pixel value of the green component of the image. The proposed method works in the spatial domain of the image. We check the difference value between secret byte ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) value and the pixel ASCII value. For comparison embedding is initially done without considering the difference of the pixel values. To prove the efficiency of the proposed method embedding is done based on the difference value. A difference less than or equal to 10 is considered so that the MSE (Mean Square Error) value is reduced and the PSNR (Peak Signal to Noise Ratio) value is increased when compared to the other techniques. We also show that there is improved PSNR and reduced MSE value while embedding in the green component when compared to embedding in the Red or the Blue component.