high-capacity image steganography with minimum modified bits based on data mapping and lsb substitution

Steganography is the art and practice of communication using hidden messages. The least significant bits (LSB) based method is the well-known type of steganography in the spatial domain. Usually, achieving the larger embedding capacity in LSB-based methods requires a large number of LSB bits modification which indirectly reduces the visual quality of stego-image and increases the risk of steganalysis detection attacks. In this study, we propose a novel steganography method with data mapping strategy which can reduce the number of bits modification per pixel. In the proposed method, four secret data bits are mapped with the four most significant bits of a cover pixel. Furthermore, the only two LSBs of a pixel are modified to indicate the mapping strategy. Experimental results show that the proposed method is able to achieve 3.48% larger embedding capacity while enhancing the visual quality (i.e., peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR) 3.73 dB) and reducing the modification of 0.76 bits per pixel. Moreover, the proposed method provides security against basic Regular and Singular groups (RS) steganalysis and histogram steganalysis detection attacks.