A Secure Matrix Embedding (ME)-Based Steganography with High Embedding Efficiency and Capacity

In the image stegenography, the distortion of stego image will be increased by increasing the number of embedded bits and this makes the enemy be much more suspicious about the existence of secret information in the images. One can use the matrix embedding technique to alleviatethis problem which can be done by dividing the cover image into some blocks and limiting the changes in each block.However, the embedding capacity will be limited by this technique. In this article, a solution to this problem (limited embedding capacity), a modified version of Fan’s method, is presented.In this technique, the maximum number of changes in each block is chosen to be 2 instead of 1 in Fan’s technique which leads to reducing the blocks length and increasing the embedding capacity.The results revealed that for a given capacity, the stego image distortion is decreased and the embedding capacity is increased in compared with the other existing methods in this field. Also, thestego images have high PSNR along with high vision quality which leads to more security.