An Image Hiding Scheme by Linking Pixels in the Circular Way

The proposed method in this paper is derived from Mielikainen's hiding method. However, there exist some significant differences between two methods. In Mielikainen's method, pixels are partitioned into pairs and a LSB matching function is applied to two pixels for hiding. On the contrary, the proposed method partitions pixels into groups with three pixels in each group. The bits of pixels in each group are linked by using an exclusive OR (XOR) operator in a circular way. If the number of different values between the calculated XOR values and the secret bits is smaller than or equal to 2 in a group, the proposed method can guarantee that at most one pixel is needed to be modified by adding/subtracting its value to/from one, and three secret bits can be embedded to three pixels. Through theoretical analysis, the amount of the embedded secret data in the proposed method is larger than those in other methods under the same amount of pixel modifications. Taking real images in our experiments, the quality of stego-images in the proposed method is higher than those in other methods.