Enhancing the Quality of the Stego Image Using Quads-based Differences in Spatial Domain Images

In contemporary times, ensuring the security of shared information is a paramount concern to prevent unauthorized interception during communication over public networks. One approach to address this challenge is implementing data hiding (DH) techniques. However, the concealment of confidential data within multimedia files, such as images, often results in a degradation of visual quality. This decline in quality can raise suspicions among unauthorized users regarding the potential presence of concealed data. Throughout the years, researchers have devised various DH algorithms to mitigate the issue of significant image distortion following the data embedding process. Nevertheless, achieving a high-quality stego image, which carries secret data, remains a formidable task. This paper introduces a novel DH method grounded in the difference expansion (DE) paradigm, aiming to enhance the quality of the stego image for a given payload size. Experimental results presented herein demonstrate an improvement in visual quality, albeit with the observation that augmenting the embedding capacity introduces additional noise.