A Novel Secure Data Hiding Scheme Using a Secret Reference Matrix

Steganography is a study to hide secret message in multimedia cover which will be transmitted through the Internet. The cover carriers can be image, video, sound or text data. In this paper, a novel scheme is proposed to hide data in 8-bits gray-scale cover image based on a 256times256 secret reference matrix (SRM) which was constructed by using a 3times3 table with unrepeated digits from 0~8. Experimental results showed, under the same hiding capacity, the proposed method has better stego-image quality (measured with peak-signal-to-noise-ratio, PSNR) compared with some other research methods using similar approach. The proposed method has high hiding capacity, better stego-image quality, requires little calculation and is easy to implement.