ABSTRACT
Message embedding is the art of covert communication in which secret messages are embedded into innocuous looking objects, known as covers, through slight modification. The covers concealing secret data are called stego objects. The goal of message embedding is to embed a secret message so that its very existence in the stego object cannot be revealed. Thus, security is mostly influenced by the embedding efficiency, which is the number of bits embedded per embedding change. In this paper, we will show that a disk modulo method called DM can be used for covert communication without sharing the placement of embedding changes. This allows construction of message embedding methods with improved security. We then describe an efficient message embedding method for minimizing the embedding impact using a DM allocation method with the goal of decreasing the number of embedding changes. Finally, the embedding efficiency of the proposed method is compared with theoretically achievable bounds.
