Image Steganography using Customized Differences between the Neighboring Pixels

Steganography in digital images, a method of concealing secret data within multimedia files like images, audio, and video, is gaining attention for safeguarding sensitive information despite facing challenges related to the visibility quality of concealed data as the payload capacity increases. Numerous research works have been carried out to mitigate this issue, yet there is a need for further refinement in their approach to tackling the same problem. This article presents a new steganographic technique in images utilizing customized differences between the neighboring pixels to embed the bits of confidential data. The results of this approach are achieved by utilizing general-purpose images and randomly generated bits to represent the secret data obtained from a commonly used dataset. The experimental results highlight a promising performance in terms of the peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), which ranges from 43.12 to 69.41 decibels (dB).