Zone-Based Image Steganography Using Pixel Value Difference for Enhanced Embedding

Securing sensitive information in today's interconnected digital landscape has become increasingly critical. Steganography, a technique of embedding secret data within digital media such as images, provides a viable solution for protecting confidential information during transmission. However, balancing the quality of the stego image and the payload capacity remains a significant challenge. This paper introduces a novel steganographic method that divides the pixel value range (0-225) into three distinct zones for optimized data embedding. By classifying pixel values into separate zones, the proposed method aims to minimize distortion in the resulting stego image while maintaining high embedding capacity. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves an average Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) of 68.91 dB with the Pixel ruler test image, indicating superior image quality, which shows an outperformance over the respective compared methods.