Enhancing Steganography in Digital Images Through Neighboring Pixel Differences Expansion
Erick Delenia, Ntivuguruzwa Jean De La Croix, Tohari Ahmad · 2024
Current technological advancements encourage the importance of data security, especially in protecting the confidentiality of sensitive information. Several studies have proposed various methods to hide data. Steganography is predominantly used as it hides information within a digital medium. Given the widespread use of digital images, steganography on these media has proven very effective in enhancing information security. However, existing methods often suffer from problems in data hiding due to the imbalance between the resulting image quality and the stored data's size. To overcome this, this paper introduces a new steganography approach by expanding the difference between neighbouring pixels in an image. This approach achieves better performance than previous methods. This is demonstrated by the superior metric evaluation results with PSNR (Peak Signal to Noise Ratio) values between 47.74 and 73.25 dB and SSIM (Structural Similarity), which reaches a maximum of 0.99. In addition, from the implementation results with media and payload variations, the quality is not much different, as shown by the consistent standard value of 1, which indicates the stability and consistency of the model.