A novel terraced field block based scheme for data hiding

Providing higher embedding capacity with better visual quality is always a challenging technical problem in the field of data hiding. In this paper, we propose a novel scheme based on terraced fields to hide data. Exploiting the features of the terraced field, the proposed scheme achieves large hiding capacity and less visual distortion. It hides three bits of secret message per pixel pair in a cover image in reference to the key matrix, which is divided into sets of terraced field blocks. The experimental results demonstrate that the simplicity and stego-image quality of the proposed scheme outperform the existing turtle shell based data hiding technique under equal conditions.