A Minimal Euclidean Distance Searching Technique for Sudoku Steganography

Sudoku, a simple and fun game of logic, has been used for steganography to conceal messages into a digital image recently. Chang et al. adapted the idea of smallest Manhattan distance, embedding secret messages into the neighbors of the located element according to a given Sudoku solution. Hong et al. improved Chang et al.psilas technique by introducing additional set of candidate elements to reduce distortions. However, the aforementioned methods suffer from undesirable distortions because the Manhattan distance architectures are used in their method. The proposed method suggests a new scheme for searching embedding positions based on the nearest Euclidean distance, so that minimal distortions can be reached. The experimental results show that, in average, the visual quality of stego image is 1.70 dB higher than that of Chang et al.psilas method, and 0.72 dB higher than that of Hong et al.psilas method under the same embedding capacity.