High capacity data hiding scheme based on multi-bit encoding function

Secret message capacity and stego image quality are the two important measures for stenography. In this paper, a high hiding capacity and acceptable stego image quality steganographic scheme is proposed based on multi-bit encoding function. Using our method, the embedding capacity is as high as 4.5 bpp (with acceptable stego image quality, i.e., PSNR better than 30 dB). There are two major contributions of this scheme. It does not need additional complex steps to embed the secret data and no additional external information is needed to recover the secret data. From our experimental results and discussion, we show that our proposed scheme achieves higher capacity than other data hiding schemes based on encoding function while maintaining suitable image quality.