A New Adaptive Steganographic Method with Scalable Capacity and High Vision Quality

In the present paper, a new adaptive steganographic method has been proposed to embed secret data in an image. Proposed method allows the user to set algorithm parameters in a way that reducing the distortion resulted from stegnanography in the image in spite of embedding secret data in all pixels of image, considering size of secret data required for sending to destination. These parameters can be also used as a secret steganographic key. In this method, considering the human vision system, more secrete data bits are embedded in edged areas of image than in its smooth ones. In the proposed method, blocks are classified into different groups based on the extent of local complexity of pixels, and the capacity of each group is determined by total size of secret data. This method is also resistant to statistical and histogram steganalysis attack.