On LSB Data Hiding in High-Definition Images Using Morphological Operations

The aim of steganography is to conceal the presence of communication by way of hiding secret data in perceptually irrelevant parts of a cover object. In this paper, we propose a method for hiding secret images in edge regions of high-definition (HD) images because the human visual system is less sensitive to intensity changes in these regions. In particular, least significant bit substitution is used to embed a secret image in the edge regions of a HD cover image. The edge regions are obtained using a Canny edge detector followed by morphological operations which are used to control the hiding capacity. A performance assessment of the proposed method reveals the trade-off between capacity, detectability, and perceptibility of the hidden data.