steganography in images, based on pixel value differencing in 16-pixels blocks

Nowaday, steganography as an art or technique for hiding data in various media, has a wide variety of applications in information management. steganography can be used to convey a confidential message, enhance information security, categorize information, store specific information, and more . Image is one of the most popular media used in data hiding process and there are various methods for hiding information in images, the most common of which is the method of embedding information in low-value bits of the image and for which various algorithms and methods have been developed. One of these methods, which has a mathematical basis, is to use the calculation of the difference between the values of two adjacent pixels in order to identify suitable points for embedding confidential information. In this paper, two new methods for data embedding in images are proposed based on calculating the differences in the values of adjacent pixels in 4*4 blocks and tested on different images using the Mean Squares of Errors, Peek signal-to-noise ratio and structural similarity criterias has been studied and analyzed. Evaluations show that the first proposed method is optimal due to better results.