Capacity and Imperceptibility Enhancement in Audio Steganography via a Novel Tone Insertion Model

With the growing demand for secure data transmission in today’s internet-centric landscape, audio steganography has emerged as a promising technique for covert communication. This paper introduces a novel audio steganography method based on tone insertion, designed to enhance payload capacity and imperceptibility. Unlike conventional bit-level embedding, the proposed approach utilizes tone-based encoding of English-typed characters, enabling symbols to be represented through distinct tones. This significantly increases the payload without compromising audio quality. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed scheme achieves a threefold increase in payload capacity compared to existing methods. The methods effectiveness is validated using standard metrics, including Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR), Mean Square Error (MSE), and Structural Similarity Index Measure (SSIM). The results confirm superior data embedding capacity and perceptual transparency performance, making the approach well-suited for secure audio-based communication.