Emoticon-based text steganography in chat

Written text contains less redundant spaces which could be used for embedding, so embedding secrets into written texts is a challenging task. To break through the difficulty of text steganography, a text steganography in chat scheme was proposed in 2007. This scheme uses the abbreviations used in SMS-texting language to conceal secret data into chat sentences. As communications via chat room become more and more popular in people's lives, we propose another new text steganography method which is also used in chat rooms. The proposed scheme uses emotional icons (also called emoticons) to hide secret bits into the sentences used in chat. Due to the tremendous numbers of emoticons used in many kinds of chat rooms, this paper improves the embedding capacity of the previous method obviously. In addition, the experimental results show the easy-to-use character of the proposed scheme.