A pixel contrast based medical image steganography to ensure and secure patient data

The information and communications technology time are essential for the security aspect of processes and methodologies. The security of information should a key priority in the secret exchange of information between two parties. That's to guarantee the information's security, some strategies are used, and they include steganography, watermark, and cryptography. In cryptography, the secrete message is converted into unintelligible text, but the existence of the secrete message is noticed, on the other hand, watermarking and steganography involve hiding the secrete message in a way that its presence cannot be noticed. Presently, the design and development of an effective image steganography system are facing several challenges such as low capacity, poor robustness and imperceptibility. To surmount these challenges, a new secure image steganography work called the Pixels Contrast (PC) method is proposed along with the eight neighbour's method and Huffman coding algorithm to overcome the imperceptibility and capacity issues. In the proposed method, a new image partitioning with a Henon map is used to increase the security part. This method has three main stages (preprocessing, embedding, and extracting) each stage has a different process. In this method, different standard images were used such as medical images and SIPI-dataset. The experimental result was evaluated with different measurement parameters like Histogram Analysis Structural Similarity Index (SSIM), Peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR). Compared the proposed method with the previous works then proved to be better than existing methods. In short, the proposed steganography method outperformed the commercially available data hiding schemes, thereby resolving the existing issues.