A secure data hiding scheme for binary images

Abstract

This letter presents a novel steganography scheme capable of concealing a piece of critical information in a host message which is a binary image (e.g., a facsimile). A binary matrix and a weight matrix are used as secret keys to protect the hidden information. Given a host image of size m x n, the proposed scheme can conceal as many as [log(2) (mn + 1)] bits of data in the image by changing, at most, two bits in the host image. This scheme can provide a higher security, embed more information, and maintain a higher quality of the host image than available schemes.