Designing a Modified Version of the Message Hiding Algorithm in Image Steganography, Based on the AMBTC Compression Method

Today, image steganography is one of the most important ways to protect information security in electronic networks, especially the Internet. To reduce the traffic load in the networks, we try to use image compression techniques along with steganography. One of the methods of steganography in the field of compressed images is the AMBTC-based image steganography. This algorithm is based on advanced mathematical methods, but uses a direct replacement to hide the message bits at each bit level of the compressed code of each image. The probability of destroying each bit in this method is %50. In this paper, instead of directly replacing the compressed code bit levels, the xor operator is suggested to hide message bits, which reduces this probability to %25. The result of this correction is the improvement of the visual quality of the hidden images, without affecting their histograms. Evaluation of the proposed design by the testing criteria such as PSNR, MSE and SSIM on 1000 natural images, shows the superiority of the modified design.