A High-Capacity Image Steganography Based on LSB Inversion and Summing of Bit Pairs

Nowadays, computer users face a challenge in maintaining the security of their information. There are many techniques for transferring information safely over networks. Image steganography, one of these techniques, is an effective way to conceal important information. The Least Significant Bit (LSB) technique is a famous method for data hiding. This technique exchanges the LSBs of the cover image pixel with the mystery message bits. However, it was always the challenging problem of increasing the number of bits utilized for embedding that led to a decreased quality of the stego image. Hence, this research targets optimizing the stego image quality by inverting the LSBs of image pixels to reduce the changes that occur in pixels. This paper proposes a new method based on summing the pairs and inverting the LSBs of the cover image pixels. The secret data are arranged in pairs, and then the sum of every two successive pairs is computed. After that, the secret bits are embedded by inverting the pixel bits depending on that sum. Finally, for more enhancement of the results, some of the inverted bits will be inverted again. Rigorous experiments using benchmark datasets confirm that the proposed scheme yields superior results compared to the substitution LSB scheme. Also, shows the effectiveness of the proposed approach in achieving a high payload with acceptable visual quality for stego image that cannot be noticed by human eyes when compared with state-of-the-art steganography techniques.