A High Capacity Spatial Domain Data Hiding Scheme for Medical Images

This paper presents a spatial steganography scheme with high steganography capacity for medical images. In the proposed scheme, four least significant bits of the cover image are used to hide secret information and a logistic mapping is employed to scramble cover image before embedding operation. In order to achieve minor degradation to cover medical image, the ROI region is excluded manually before embedding operation and an adaptive embedding strategy is employed. Experiment results show that, compared with Fan L's hiding scheme, our proposed scheme can improve the steganography capacity by 2.25 times, and the maximum peak signal to noise ratio loss and average loss are only 0.78 and 0.45, respectively. In other words, our scheme does not only improve the capacity of the existing method but also can maintain an acceptable quality of the cover image.