Image Steganography Based on Modified LSB Substitution Method and Data Mapping

This paper introduces an image steganography method based on modified least significant bit (LSB) substitution technique and data mapping. Initially, the secret image is pre-processed using a new data mapping scheme to reduce the number of 1's in secret data. The secret data is then embedded into the host image using a modified LSB substitution technique. In this technique, each pixel value of host image is changed if value of secret bit is 1 otherwise the LSB of each pixel value will remain unchanged which is different from conventional LSB technique. This improves the visual quality of the stego image by changing the less number of bits in image pixel. Experimental results indicate that the proposed method provides high quality stego image. Moreover, it outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), mean square error (MSE), and structural similarity (SSIM).