Histogram Shift Steganography: A Technique to Thwart Histogram Based Steganalysis

We present an image steganographic technique to preserve the first-order and the second-order statistics of the host image. Experimental results show that the proposed method can preserve the image quality and also resists typical statistical analysis based attacks. The new steganography method solves the distortion problem with the HKC algorithm and hence thwarts the Kuo attack. The method is based on the idea of histogram shift, in which two empty bins are produced in the image histogram that are then filled up using their neighboring bins through the embedding process.