Enhanced Secret Data Hiding in Audio Samples via Bit Distribution and Segmentation

The backbone of information technology has recently been identified as mainly based on information security. Information security is expected to be aligned with advances in information technology by keeping confidential data during transmission. Regarding confidentiality, steganography is used to hide private data by using publicly available multimedia data as carriers. Multimedia data mostly used in steganography are in the form of audio, images, or video. Some steganography methods have been introduced in those various forms, although challenges remain regarding the capacity for carried secret data and the quality of the resulting stego. This research proposes a new steganography algorithm based on hiding secret data in audio samples via bit distribution and segmentation. The secret bits are distributed evenly among the audio samples to minimize differences with the original samples according to the threshold. The embedding technique uses the segmentation of embedding spaces as a reference to extract secret data and original audio samples. The experimental results demonstrate significant performance with embedding capacity ranging from 273 to 972 kb, which is outperforming compared to the considered existing works. Moreover, the proposed method achieves the highest peak signal-to-ratio (PSNR) of 120.71 decibels (dB) for a payload size of 1 kilobit (kb).