Inverted LSB image steganography using adaptive pattern to improve imperceptibility

Abstract

Various image steganography methods have been developed to improve the stego image quality, i.e. imperceptibility, capacity, and security. This research proposes an adaptive method that can select the most optimal pattern to minimize the error ratio due to message embedding. This adaptive pattern can optimize the performance of the inverted LSB substitution method, based on the two-bit + least-significant-bit (LSB) pattern in the container image. Before embedding, the message and container image bits are tested and the error ratio is calculated using the inverted LSB substitution method for various possible patterns. The pattern that has the least error rate is selected to embed the message. The use of this adaptive pattern in inverted LSB image steganography significantly increases imperceptibility. Based on the test results and by comparing it to previous studies, it is found increased results, the PSNR value ranges from 52.49 to 57.45, and the SSIM ranges from 0.9991 to 0.9999 with 1 BPP capacity.