Enhancing the capability of data hiding method based on reduced difference expansion

The last few decades have been marked by a rapid growth and significant enhancement of data hiding techniques. Data hiding is performed by utilizing some carriers to conceal private information which is further extracted later to verify the genuineness. Digital steganography has been recognized among the recent and most popular data hiding techniques. It is a technique of concealing the existence of exchanging information between individuals or communication parties which is performed by embedding confidential information into multimedia carriers such as audio, text, image and video. It originates from the concept that if the communication is visible, the suspicion or attack is obvious. Hence, the aim is to always disguise the presence of the hidden secret data. Recently, digital image steganography has been applied in various applications. However, achieving good quality of the stego image and a reasonable embedding capacity is still a severe challenge. Thereby, in this paper we suggest a digital image steganographic technique which is developed based on pixel block, reduced difference expansion (RDE) and constant base point which is intended to enhance the quality of the stego image while achieving a good embedding capacity. According to the experimental results, both quality and capacity which are respectively evaluated by measuring the peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) and number of hidden secret bits are well preserved. That is, our method outdoes the previous ones.