A data hiding approach using enhanced-RDE in grayscale images

Nowadays, the internet has become a broad network enabling many enterprises around the world to interact while sharing data. Nonetheless, this technology has brought many challenges related to securing private information. Information hiding is one of the best and most challenging field dealing with securing organizational sensitive data due to many factors such as identity theft, information phishing, privacy violation, copyright etc. To address these challenges, several data hiding approaches have been already suggested by many researchers around the globe. The main goal was to improve security, embedding capacity and the quality of the stego media. However, research have shown that there is still a challenge to achieve a good embedding capacity while preserving the quality of the stego media. Accordingly, to contribute to overcoming these problems this paper presents a new data hiding approach that ameliorates the quality of the stego image and the embedding capacity using enhanced reduced difference expansion (E-RDE) and pixel block. The grayscale image is first divided into blocks of size 4×1 after that the difference between pixels is computed in each block. To maintain the quality and capacity, the proposed E-RDE is further applied to reduce the difference values. The experiment shows that with this approach good results are yielded compared to the existing approaches.