A Steganographic Approach to Secure Data Using Pairs-Based Difference Expansion

Within the realm of security systems, the concept of information hiding is a vast and encompassing field that spans across a wide spectrum of diverse research domains. The technological advancement in data transmission over the public network made the need for data security a field to focus on for information protection. Several research works have been proposed to use various data-hiding paradigms to improve the confidentiality of the secret data transmitted over the public network. However, the previously proposed solution did not achieve promising performance and efficiency in protecting the personal information of companies and individuals. To address this challenge, this research proposes a steganographic algorithm to enhance the security of the bitstreams of the secret data using pairs-based difference expansion in the neighboring pixels of a digital image. The experimental results of our method demonstrated a superior performance over the existing method. It is important to note that our method improved the payload capacity from 0.0585 bpp to 0.1370 bpp in the existing and proposed methods, respectively.