Improved pixel hiding method for steganography of gray images within color images

Steganography is the process of data hiding into a host signal with three main characteristics: imperceptibility, payload and quality of the recovered data. For images, one of the pixel modication methods is the BPHM (Block Pixel Hiding Method) which has good imperceptibility and payload, but it does not ensure the good quality of the recovered secret image. In this paper, we propose an improvement of the BPHM with the purpose to obtain similar results to the well-known QIM (Quantization Index Modulation) method. According to the results, the imperceptibility of the stego image and the quality of the recovered secret image were improved, and then, our results are closer to QIM results