Minimizing Sample Space to Optimize Quality of Stego-Audio

The rapid progress of information and communication technology forces all application aspects to be developed securely, considering that data are often transmitted over public networks. If the security is not well applied, the data can be easily compromised during transmission. So, a data hiding scheme is essential to protect confidential data. Some methods have been introduced; however, the data size and the resulted data quality are still challenging. This research works on these problems by employing audio as the cover to carry confidential data and focuses on analyzing the audio sample space accommodating those data. Here, we propose a method to optimize stego-audio quality by reducing the sample space capacity to produce better audio quality. The experimental result shows that the stego-audio quality evaluated using Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) goes up by 31.3 dB without additional steps such as smoothing or payload distribution, which is simpler than the previous schemes.