A method embedding email address into digital images

Generally, being an efficient information hiding system, what we want to achieve is the high embedding capacity of the cover image (i.e. the image used to imply secret message as a carrier) and the high visual quality of the stego image (i.e. the image that has carried secret message). The method we proposed in this paper was used to embed an email address into an 8-bit grayscale cover image to complete the secret data transmission between the sender and the receiver. Inspiring from the “Hamming+1” method proposed by Zhang et al. and the previous methods, we embed twelve secret bits of the binary string of the secret message, which was converted from an email address, into a block of 4×4 cover pixels of a cover image sized 512×512 each time. The experimental results show that the proposed method achieves high embedding capacity and acceptable visual quality of the stego image.