A Block-Based Adaptive Data Hiding Approach Using Pixel Value Difference and LSB Substitution to Secure E-Governance Documents

In order to protect secret digital documents against vulnerabilities while communicating, steganography algorithms are applied. It protects a digital file from unauthorized access by hiding the entire content. Pixel-value-difference being a method from spatial domain steganography utilizes the difference gap between neighbor pixels to fulfill the same. The proposed approach is a block-wise embedding process where blocks of variable size are chosen from the cover image, therefore, a stream of secret digital contents is hidden. Least significant bit (LSB) substitution method is applied as an adaptive mechanism and optimal pixel adjustment process (OPAP) is used to minimize the error rate. The proposed application succeeds to maintain good hiding capacity and better signal-to-noise ratio when compared against other existing methods. Any means of digital communication specially e-Governance applications could be highly benefited from this approach.