High Capacity Data Hiding for Grayscale Images

High embedding capacity and low image distortion factors are main concerns of information hiding researchers. No scheme can achieve these two factors simultaneously. The purpose of achieving either high embedding capacity or low image distortion varies from application to application. This paper presents a high embedding capacity information hiding method for grayscale images. The proposed method converts binary secret data into secret digits in the base-5 numeral system first. Next, one secret digit in the base-5 numeral system is embedded into one cover pixel. The experimental results show that the proposed method can be used to embed two secret bits into one cover pixel with the imperceptible image distortion. Comparing with some other works, we found that our method indeed outperforms all others in terms of embedding capacity.