Improved LSB matching steganography resisting histogram attacks

This paper presents an improved LSB matching steganography, which complementarily modifies the pairs of pixels with adjacent intensity to embed secrete message. In LSB matching steganography, when adding or subtracting one from the cover image pixel, two adjacent bins of the histogram will be altered-the bin value of the modified pixel's intensity increased by one, and one of its adjacent bin's value decreased by one. Based on the alteration of histogram caused by LSB matching, the improved algorithm embeds two bits in a pair of pixels with adjacent intensity one time so as to minimize the alteration of histogram. Compared to the original LSB matching, the new one preserves the first order statistical property of cover image extremely. Experimental results show the proposed algorithm obviously outperforms LSB matching algorithm in the aspect of resisting first order statistical attacks based on histogram.