An adaptive LSB matching steganography based on octonary complexity measure

Adaptive steganography methods tend to increase the security against attacks. Most of adaptive methods use LSB flipping (LSB-F) for embedding part of their algorithms. LSB-F is very much vulnerable against simple steganalysis methods but it allows the adaptive algorithms to be extractable at the receiver side. Use of LSB matching (LSB-M) could increase the security but extraction of data at the receiver is difficult or, in occasions, impossible. There are numerous attacks against LSB-M. In this paper we are proposing an adaptive algorithm which, unlike most adaptive methods, uses LSB-M as its embedding method. The proposed method uses a complexity measure based on a local neighborhood analysis for determination of secure locations of an image. Comparable adaptive methods that use LSB-M suffer from possible changes in the complexity of pixels when embedding is performed. The proposed algorithm is such that when a pixel is categorized as complex at the transmitter and is embedded the receiver will identify it as complex too, and data is correctly retrieved. Better performance of the algorithm is shown by obtaining higher PSNR values for the embedded images with respect to comparable adaptive algorithms. The security of the algorithm against numerous attacks is shown to be higher than LSB-M. Also, it is compared with a recent adaptive method and is proved to be advantageous for most embedding rates.