A Novel approach of Data Hiding Pixel Mapping Method (PMM)

Steganography is a process that involves hiding a message in an appropriate carrier like image or audio. The carrier can be sent to a receiver without any one except the authenticated receiver only knows existence of the information. Considerable amount of work has been carried out by different researchers on steganography. In this work the authors propose a novel Steganographic method for hiding information within the spatial domain of the gray scale image. The proposed approach works by selecting the embedding pixels using some mathematical function and then finds the 8 neighborhood of the each selected pixel and map each two bit of the secret message in each of the neighbor pixel according to the features of that pixel in a specified manner. This approach can be modified for mapping of four bits of the secret message by considering more no of features of the embedding pixel. Before embedding a checking has been done to find out whether the selected pixel or its neighbor lies at the boundary of the image or not. This solution is independent of the nature of the data to be hidden and produces a stego image with minimum degradation