Flipping the Message Bits to Increase Imperceptibility in the Least Significant Bit Image Steganography

Abstract

Abstract Imperceptibility is one of the issues that continue to be studied in the science of steganography in images. Imperceptibility means that the message embedded in the cover image cannot be perceived by the human senses, especially the sense of sight. Flipping the message bits is the method proposed in this study, which is inspired by the inverted LSB method, but this method is simpler because it only flips the message bit when the change in the cover image pixel exceeds 50%. Although the proposed method is simpler than the inverted LSB method, based on the test it is found that the imperceptibility quality can increase significantly when compared to the traditional LSB method. This is evidenced by the PSNR value increasing around 9dB, from 51dB to 60dB and the MSE value dropping from around 0.44 to 0.05.