A high payload EMD-based steganographic method using two extraction functions

In recent years, the EMD-based steganographic method has become more and more popular because of its easy implementation and high security. However, it had two shortcomings: One is the secret data must convert into non-binary numeral system, and the other is low payload. In order to overcome these shortcomings, some studies used the hexagon (or octagon)-shaped reference matrix instead of the extraction function. In this study, a high payload EMD-based steganographic method is proposed, a combined mapping matrix is generated by two extraction functions in the embedding and extracting procedure. With the diversity of the definition of these two extraction functions, the proposed method achieves high security. The experimental results show that the proposed method achieves high payload and the quality of stego-image satisfies the human vision system sensitivity. (C) 2021 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.