SECURITY AND COMMUNICATION NETWORKS

Security Comm. Networks 2016; 9:721728

Published online 22 June 2015 in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com). DOI: 10.1002/sec.1275

SPECIAL ISSUE PAPER

MDE-based image steganography with large embedding

capacity
Zhaoxia Yin and Bin Luo*
Key Laboratory of Intelligent Computing & Signal Processing, Ministry of Education, Anhui University, Hefei, 230601, China

ABSTRACT
The big data era calls for image steganography with large embedding capacity and good image quality. Previous methods
described in the literature pay more attention to image quality rather than payload. This paper proposes a large capacity
steganographic method based on modication direction exploitation and pixel pair matching. By virtue of a reference
matrix with particular properties, one or two 9-ary digits can be embedded into each cover pixel pair depending on different
payloads. Experimental results demonstrate high embedding capacity as well as good image quality and security. Copyright
2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
KEYWORDS
steganography; modification direction exploiting; reference matrix; pixel pair matching
*Correspondence
Bin Luo, Anhui University, No.111 Jiulong Road, Hefei, 230601 China.
E-mail: Luobin_ahu@163.com

1. INTRODUCTION
As the exchange of information become more and more
extensive and important in society, the problem of
protecting this information from unintended and undesired
usage becomes more complex. With the development of
big data and cloud computing, the demand for information
security and privacy protection is increasingly strong.
Naturally, steganography and steganalysis techniques are
the subject of much current research focus [1,2]. The aim
of steganography is to hide the existence of information
within innocuous carriers, with the goal of modifying the
carrier in an imperceptible way, so that neither any
evidence of data hiding nor the existence of the embedded
data itself is revealed. A wide range of multimedia can be
used as information carriers, such as text [3], voice [4,5],
images [69], and video [10]. Amongst these carriers,
images are now the most commonly used covers because
they have a wide range of potential applications and images
contain a large quantity of redundant space that can potentially be exploited.
The image used to embed data is called the cover
image or cover, and it becomes known as the stegoimage after data have been embedded. Because there is
limitation to the sensitivity of human senses, very small
distortions in digital images cannot easily be identied. The
ultimate goal of image steganography is to embed as many
bits as possible (i.e., having a large embedding capacity)

Copyright 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

without leaving any detectable distortion in the cover

image (therefore demonstrating good image quality).
However, quality and capacity often have an antagonistic
relationship. Previously developed image steganographic
methods, such as modication direction exploitation
(MDE)-based methods [11], usually focus more on providing good image quality rather than large embedding
capacity.
The rst MDE-based method, known as the least significant bit (LSB) matching revisited method (LSB-MR), was
proposed by Mielikainen in 2006 [11]. In LSB-MR, one
secret bit is embedded into the least signicant bit of the
rst pixel directly, while another bit is concealed via a
binary function based on the cover pixel pair. In the same
year, Zhang and Wang proposed the well-known
exploiting modication direction (EMD) method [12], in
which different modication directions are exploited to
represent different secret data and lead to higher embedding efciency. A very similar method was proposed independently by J. Fridrich and D. Soukal, which is referred to
as grid colorings in steganography [13]. Both of the two
methods improve the stego-image quality and embedding
efciency greatly. However, for a group of n cover pixels,
only a maximum of one pixel is increased or decreased by
1 when embedding data. Therefore, it can be argued that
the potential exploitation of modication directions is still
incomplete. To improve embedding capacity, Kim et al.
proposed EMD-2 [14] which modies 2 of n (n 2) cover
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MDE-based image steganography

pixels to allow for the embedding of more data. For the

specic case where n = 2, this can be dened as a pixel pair,
and in the context of steganography, the utilization of these
pixel pairs to embed multi-ary digits has also been investigated in the literature [15]. In order to achieve the best
stego-image quality, the base of the digital system should
be changed according to different payloads in Refs.
[14,15], so both of the two methods look like a little complex. In 2008, Chang et al. proposed Sudoku [16], which
uses Sudoku solutions to guide pixel modication, and
Hong et al. rened this approach to develop a new search
algorithm (Sudoku-SR) [17] to improve embedding
quality. The performance of Sudoku-SR was subsequently
improved further by Yin et al. [18]. In 2009, Chao et al.
proposed diamond encoding [19] to embed one B-ary digit
into each pixel pair where B = 2k2 + 2k + 1 and k 1. To
improve image quality based on diamond encoding, Chen
et al. adopted a new reference matrix to propose square
matrix encoding (SME) [20] in 2013. All of the MDEbased methods introduced previously [1220] conceal
one B-ary digit by exploiting the modication directions
of two cover pixels under the guidance of a reference
matrix or table, and their embedding capacity is no more
than (1/2)log2B bpp (bit per pixel).
Currently, steganographic methods with large capacity
and good quality are in great demand for a wide range of
applications such as covert communication and privacy
protection. Therefore, in this paper, a novel MDE-based
steganographic method with large embedding capacity
and acceptable image quality is proposed. To achieve this,
a 9-ary reference matrix with special properties is designed
to guide the modications of pixel pairs. This new approach can easily be distinguished from the previous
methods introduced previously, because in this work, we
explore the potential of embedding directions in the twodimensional space. Thus, one or two 9-ary digits can be
embedded into each pixel pair according to different payloads. Therefore, not only can the maximum embedding
capacity be up to log29 bpp but also the embedding distortion can be minimized. Experimental results demonstrate

the signicant improvement in embedding capacity and

the acceptable image quality, as well as the good security.
The rest organization of this paper is as follows.
Section 2 presents the proposed data embedding and
extraction method, including a simple numerical example.
Quality analysis and the security evaluation are demonstrated in Section 3. Section 4 concludes the paper.

2. PROPOSED METHOD
In this section, we describe the improved image steganographic method based on MDE in detail. A reference matrix M with particular properties has been designed and
can be generated with a base-9 numeral system function
at rst. Then, the potential of embedding directions in the
two-dimensional space of M can be explored and one or
two 9-ary digits can be embedded into each pixel pair by
virtue of the special properties of M. These properties are
dened in the succeeding discussions.
2.1. Denitions and properties
Denition 1. The notation M(x, y) is a reference to the value
that appears in column x and row y of the matrix M, and this
value M(x, y) can be calculated according to Equation (3),
using the parameters dened in Equations (1) and (2)
F x floorx=3

(1)

Rx; y x mod y

(2)

M x; y R3F x F y 3Rx; 3 Ry; 3; 9 (3)

This results in the reference matrix M sized 9 9, which
is shown in Figure 1(a).
Denition 2.
M M 0 M 1 M 2 M m ; m 8

(4)

Each M sized 3 3 is shown in Figure 1(b).

Figure 1. The reference matrix M.

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MDE-based image steganography

Property 1. Each of the 9-ary digit appears exactly once in

Mi, i {0, 1, , 8}.
Property 2.
M F x; F y i M x; y M i ; x; y 0; 18

(5)

For instance, M(x, y) M0 x, y {0, 1, 2}, M(F(x),

F(y)) = M(0, 0) = 0.
M(x, y) M7 x {6, 7, 8}, y {3, 4, 5}, M(F(x), F(y)) =
M(2, 1) = 7.

2.2. Data embedding

Given an H W sized grayscale cover image I, we initially
establish the cover pixels by a pairing method. In the work
presented in this paper, it is possible to pair any two pixels,
and therefore, we scramble the pixel pair distributions
using a seed in the interests of security. This scrambled
pixel pairing is applied both in the data embedding phase
and the data extraction phase. For simplicity, we denote a
cover image by I = {P1, P2, , PH W} after pairing all
pixels Pi, i {1, 2, , H W}. For a cover pixel Pi, two
sets of candidate elements CE1(Pi) and CE2(Pi) are dened as Equation (6).
(

 
 
CE 1 Pi Pi Pi Pi ; Z  1g
 
 
CE 2 Pi Pi Pi Pi ; Z  4g

(6)

Given a binary secret bit stream S = {b1, b2, , bC},

C bH W log29c, S is rst converted into a 9-ary digital
sequence D, which can then be embedded into I, where
D = {d1, d2, , dN}, N H W. The detailed steps that are
involved in the process are as follows.
Input. I = {P1, P2, , PH W}, D = {d1, d2, , dN}, N H W.
Step 1.

m

Step 3. Solve overow and underow according to

Equation (8).
8

>
< Pi 9; Pi < 0;
(8)
Pi Pi  9; Pi > 255;
>
:
i f1; 2; ; mg
Step 4. For each cover pixel pair (Pi, Pj), i, j {m + 1, m
+ 2, , 2N  m}, nd Pi ; Pj in CE1(Pi), CE1(Pj), which
satises Equation (9), and replace (Pi, Pj) with Pi ; Pj to
conceal di until {dm + 1, , dN} are all embedded.
 
8
>
< r i R Pi ; 3
r j RPj ; 3
(9)
>


:
di M ri ; rj
Step 5. Solve overow and underow according to
Equation (10).
8
Pi 3; Pi < 0;
>
<

Pi
(10)
Pi  3; Pi > 255;
>
:
ifm 1; m 2; ; 2N  mg
Pi Pi ; if2N  m 1; ; HW g.


Output. I P1 ; P2 ; ; PHW .
Step 6.

2.3. Data extraction



Given a stego-image I P1 ; P2 ; ; PHW and payload
N, the embedded 9-ary digit sequence D = {d1, d2, , dN},
N H W can be extracted step-by-step as follows.


Input.
I P1 ; P2 ; ; PHW , N.
Step 1.
Generate reference matrix M according to
Equations (13).

0;
NbHW=2c;
Step 2.
m
2N  bHW=2c;
Otherwise:
If m = 0, go to Step 4.

0;

N bHW=2c;

2N  bHW=2c;

Otherwise:

Step 3.
Calculate (di, dj), i, j {1, 2, , m} by stego
pixel pair Pi ; Pj according to Equation (7) until {d1, d2,
, dm} are all extracted.

If m = 0, go to Step 4.
Step 2. For each cover pixel pair (Pi, Pj), i, j {1, 2, , m},
nd Pi ; Pj in CE2(Pi), CE2(Pj), which satises Equation
(7), and replace (Pi, Pj) with Pi ; Pj to conceal (di, dj), i,
j {1, 2, , m} until {d1, d2, , dm} are all embedded.
8
>
>
>
>
<
>
>
>
>
:



r i R Pi ; 9
rj

RPj ; 9



dj M ri ; rj

 
di M F r i ; F r j

Step 4.
Calculate di, i {m + 1, m + 2, , N} by stego
pixel pair (Pi, Pj), i, j {m + 1, m + 2, , 2N  m} according
to Equation (9) until {dm + 1, , dN} are all extracted.
Output.

D = {d1, d2, , dN}.

2.4. A numerical example

(7)

Security Comm. Networks 2016; 9:721728 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
DOI: 10.1002/sec

Data embedding:
Input. A cover image I sized 2 3 (shown in Figure 2(a))
and 9-ary data D = {1, 3, 7, 8} are used as inputs.
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MDE-based image steganography

Step 1. m = 2 (N  bH W/2c) = 2.
Step 2. For the cover pixel pair (P1, P2) = (100, 151) and
the two
 digits (d1, d2) = (1, 3), according

 to Equation (7),
P1 ; P2 can be calculated as P1 ; P2 99; 149; using
the candidate elements found in Equation (6):
CE 2 100 f96; 97; 98; 99; 100; 101; 102; 103; 104g;
CE2 151 f147; 148; 149; 150; 151; 152; 153; 154; 155g:
{d1, d2} = {1, 3} are then embedded
by

 replacing the pixel
pair (P1, P2) = (100, 151) with P1 ; P2 99; 149.
Step 3. For the cover pixel pair (Pi, Pj), i, j {3, 4, 5, 6}, nd
Pi ; Pj in CE1(Pi), CE1(Pj), which satises Equation (9), and
replace (Pi, Pj) with Pi ; Pj to conceal one digit until {d
 3,
d4} are both embedded. According to Equation (9), P3 ; P4
2; 0 could be found in CE1(2) = {1, 2, 3}, and CE1(0)
=
{1, 0, 1} to conceal d3 = 7. In addition,
P5 ; P6
254; 254 could be found in CE1(255) = {254, 255, 256}
and CE1(254) = {253, 254, 255} to conceal d4 = 8;
Output. The resulting output is the stego-image I, shown
in Figure 2(b).
Data extraction:


Input.
I P1 ; P2 ; ; PHW
f99; 149; 2; 1; 254; 254g, N = 4.
Step 1.
Generate reference matrix M according to
Equations (1)(3).
Step 2.

m = 2 (N  bH W/2c) = 2.

Step 3.
According to Equation (7), {d1, d2} = {1, 3}
can be extracted from the stego pixel pair P1 ; P2
99; 149.
 
Step 4.
d3 = 7 can be extracted from
 P
3 ; P4 2; 1
and d4 = 8 can be extracted from P5 ; P6 254; 254
according to Equation (9).
Output. D = {1, 3, 7, 8}.

3. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS
3.1. Image quality and embedding capacity
results
Nine commonly used grayscale images, each of dimensionality 512 512 pixels, were used in the experiments
reported in this section. For a stego-image, good visual
quality is necessary to ensure the imperceptibility of the

Figure 2. A cover image and the stego-image as examples.

724

embedded data. Peak-signal-to-noise-rate (PSNR), dened

by Equations (11) and (12), is a widely used measurement
for evaluating the degree of similarity between a stegoimage and the original image.
PSNR 10 log10

MSE

2552
MSE

dB


1 HW 
I i  I i
HW i1

(11)

(12)

where MSE (the Mean Square Error) represents the difference between a stego-image and the corresponding cover
image of size H W pixels.
Usually, a high PSNR value means high similarity and
less distortion between the stego-image and its original image. Generally speaking, it is hard for human eyes to distinguish the differences between a grayscale cover image
and the stego version with a PSNR value greater than
30 dB. Figure 3 shows the stego-images generated by the
proposed method with full payload, at 3.169 bpp.
As an example, Figure 4(a) shows the partial area of image Lena. Here, we use the original image (Figure 4(a)) to
compare the visual quality of the stego-images generated
by EMD [12], EMD-2 [14], and our new proposed method
when n = 2. Figure 4(b) shows the stego-image generated
by EMD with the maximum embedding rate of ER = 1.16
bpp. The PSNR of (b) is 52.11 dB, which is the best value
amongst all of the stego images (b)(d). Figure 4(c) is the
stego-image generated by EMD-2 with a maximum embedding rate of ER = 1.585 bpp and PSNR = 49.86 dB.
Figure 4(d) is generated by the method proposed in this paper with ER = 1.585 bpp. Its PSNR is 49.89 dB which is
similar to EMD-2.
In addition to the previous discussions, PSNR of different methods under the same payload are compared and are
shown in Figure 5. The performance curves clearly demonstrate that the PSNR of our proposed method is above
Sudoku-S, and even when the embedding rate is no more
than 1.585 bpp, has very similar performance to the LSBMR and EMD techniques. Compared with MSE, when
the payload is between 1.9 bpp and log25 bpp, the PSNR
of MSE is higher. But except for that, the proposed method
achieves better PSNR when the payload is no more than
1.8bpp. In terms of embedding capacity, the performance
curves show that our method is the best. The reason is as
follows. EMD embeds a B-ary digit into a group of n cover
pixels where B = 2n + 1 and the embedding capacity is
(1/n)log2(2n + 1) bpp; the other MDE-based methods, such
as Sudoku and SME, conceal one B-ary digit by two cover
pixels, and their embedding capacity is no more than
(1/2)log2B bpp, where B = 9 in Sudoku and B = 25 in
SME. But the proposed method can explore the embedding
directions of each pixel pair further by virtue of the
reference matrix with special properties described in
Section 2.1; thus, two 9-ary digits can be embedded into
each pixel pair. Therefore, the embedding capacity is up
to log29 bpp.
Security Comm. Networks 2016; 9:721728 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
DOI: 10.1002/sec

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MDE-based image steganography

Figure 3. Stego-images obtained by the proposed method with full payload 3.169 bpp. PSNR, peak-signal-to-noise-rate.

Considering the overall the experimental results, it can

be seen that they demonstrate that the proposed algorithm
has a considerably improved embedding capacity while
maintaining good image quality.
3.2. Steganalysis results
In order to analyze the security of the proposed method,
two commonly used steganalysis tools, the subtractive
pixel adjacency matrix (SPAM) scheme [21] and the
regular/singular (RS) scheme [22], were utilized to detect
the stego-images of the proposed method and the other
techniques discussed previously in this paper.
3.2.1. Subtractive pixel adjacency matrix (SPAM)
steganalysis.
SPAM is an effective blind steganalyzer and has good
performance with regard to the detection of stego-images
with low-amplitude and independent stego signal [23].
The detection error rate ER is calculated as follows:
ER F N F P =2

(13)

FN represents the rate of false negatives and FP the rate of

false positives, respectively. The detection error rate ER is
often used to examine the efciency of a steganalysis
scheme and also can be adopted to evaluate the robustness
Security Comm. Networks 2016; 9:721728 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
DOI: 10.1002/sec

of a steganographic method. The lower the value of ER, the

better the performance of the corresponding steganalysis
scheme. On the contrary, a higher value of ER represents
a more secure steganographic method.
The implementation of SPAM features was obtained
from [24], and the steganalyzer was trained on 1000
natural images of size 512 512 taken from RSP image
database [25]. SPAM was performed on the stego-images
generated by our proposed method, EMD-2, and Sudoku-S,
respectively. Following the recommendations given in [21],
the test was performed on two payloads, 0.25 and 0.5 bpp.
The comparison of detection rate is shown in Table I. It can
be seen that the error rate of EMD-2 and our method
are very similar, and both are higher than Sudoku-S.
For example, the error rate of rst-order SPAM
performed on Sudoku-S is 0.091 with a payload of
0.25 bpp, while the error rates obtained by the proposed
method and EMD-2 are 0.367 and 0.366, respectively.
This shows that the proposed method is more robust
than Sudoku-S and equivalent to EMD-2 in terms of
SPAM detection results. The error rates obtained by
second-order SPAM at a payload of 0.5 bpp also reveal
similar results.
3.2.2. Regular/singular steganalysis.
The RS steganalysis is considered to be useful for detecting the LSB of an image that has been modied by an
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MDE-based image steganography

(a)

(b)

(c)

(d)

Figure 4. Visual quality comparison with n = 2. (a) Partial area of original Lena, (b) stego of exploiting modication direction (EMD), (c)
stego of EMD-2, and (d) stego of the proposed method.

Figure 5. Peak-signal-to-noise-rate-ER comparison of different methods. LSB-MR, least signicant bitmatching revisited; EMD,
exploiting modication direction; SME, square matrix encoding.

LSB replacement technique [22]. An RS detection value

that is closer to zero indicates that no data has been found
to be embedded on the tested image.
726

In this section, the security of the proposed method is

evaluated by RS steganalysis and compared with
LSB-MR. The results are shown in Figure 6. The abscissa
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MDE-based image steganography

Table I. Detection rate comparison of SPAM steganalysis.

Payload

0.25 bpp

Methods

0.5 bpp

Sudoku-S

EMD-2(n = 2)

Proposed

Sudoku-S

EMD-2(n = 2)

Proposed

0.091
0.036

0.366
0.138

0.367
0.137

0.039
0.019

0.156
0.063

0.155
0.065

First-order SPAM
Second-order SPAM

SPAM, subtractive pixel adjacency matrix; EMD, exploiting modication direction.

Figure 6. Regular/singular detection values for 1000 test images. LSB-MR, least signicant bitmatching revisited.

represents image identication, and the ordinate is the

corresponding RS detection value of the image. RS
steganalysis has been performed on 1000 images from the
Uncompressed Colour Image Database [26] (with the original images with no data embedded shown by green ,
stego-images with a 1 bpp payload generated by the proposed
method shown in red , and LSB-MR shown in blue * in
Figure 6). The RS detection values of the stego-images
generated by the proposed method are close to zero because
the distribution of is similar to in Figure 6. In other
words, the stego-images generated by the proposed method
are considered to be as secure as the original images with
no data embedded in terms of RS steganalysis detection.

payload. Experimental results demonstrate high embedding capacity as well as good image quality and security.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This research work is supported by the National Natural
Science Foundation of China under grant no. 61472002,
Anhui Provincial Natural Science Foundation under grant
no. 1508085SQF216, Scientic Research Foundation for
Doctor of Anhui University under grant no. J10113190069,
and Foundation of Center of Information Support and
Assurance Technology for Anhui University under grant
no. ADXXBZ201411. Many thanks to Dr. Andrew Abel
from the University of Stirling for proofreading.

4. CONCLUSION
This paper proposed an image steganographic scheme with
both high embedding capacity and good embedding quality. A cover pixel pair can be modied to imply one or
two 9-ary digits according to different payloads. The modication directions are dened by the reference matrix with
special features. Differing from past work by others, this
method fully explores the potential of embedding space
in the reference matrix and improves the embedding
Security Comm. Networks 2016; 9:721728 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
DOI: 10.1002/sec

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Security Comm. Networks 2016; 9:721728 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
DOI: 10.1002/sec