Adaptive ±1 Steganography in Extended Noisy Region

A novel adaptive steganographic scheme for spatial image is proposed. A noisy function is used to measure texture complexity of 2 × 2 pixel blocks, which keeps monotonic increasing after ±1 modifications. Therefore, the message is embedded into the noisiest areas and the recipient can identify the embedding region. The ‘double-layered embedding’ is exploited to reduce the number of ±1 modifications, in which the fast matrix embedding and wet paper codes are applied to the least significant bit (LSB) plane and the second LSB plane, respectively. The experiments on resisting three steganalyzers show that the proposed method performs better than four typical steganographic schemes. Moreover, comparing with the extended highly undetectable steGO having parameter T = 255, the novel method achieves the competitive ability of resisting detection and faster embedding speed.