High-capacity steganography using a shared colour palette

Seppanen, Makela and Keskinarkaus (SMK) have proposed a high-capacity steganographic technique to conceal information within a colour image. The technique is significant because of the high volume of data that is embedded into pixels but it results in a high level of noise and so the quality of the resulting image is not acceptable. A new type of coding structure is proposed, which maintains a high capacity but lowers the level of noise. Secondly, an adaptive algorithm is used to identify pixel values that have a high capacity to distortion ratio. Also the maximum size of the coding structures is limited to improve the capacity/distortion tradeoff. For the tested images, an average capacity of nearly 6 bits/pixel was achieved with a peak signal to noise ratio of 40 dB.