An Adaptive Steganographic Scheme for Color Images

In this paper, a new palette-based image steganography is proposed. Palette-based images such as GIF files have been widely used on the Internet and web pages such that all browsers can recognize them. Palette-based images can be used as good carriers for transmitting secret messages. In this scheme, the Least Significant Bits (LSBs) of the palette-based image are utilized in order to hide the secret message by using the computational information hiding technique. The adaptive hiding capacity can be computed according to different sizes of the embedding block. Experimental results also show that existing artifacts in the traditional LSB-based method are unnoticeable. The number of modification pixels in the embedding process is decreased, while good stego-image quality is maintained, and the cover image is left unblemished by camouflaged information. Furthermore, the feature of adaptive hiding capacity provides the possibility of protecting different sizes of embedded secret messages.