Employing LSB and VQ for undetectable secret data hiding

Data confidentiality is a critical issue in today's computing environment. When data are exchanged via ubiquitous computing devices, they become even more vulnerable to malicious people since eavesdropping are easy. Data hiding, a technique to hide data into cover media, can reduce the risks of eavesdropping. In this paper, we propose a steganographic scheme based on vector quantization (VQ) that employs the least significant bit (LSB) method to hide secret data. The proposed data hiding scheme produces stego-images with high quality that can pass the attackers' detections. The experimental results show that the stego-images have higher PSNRs than that the original VQ-images do. The proposed scheme is significantly superior to related studies in terms of embedding capacity and image visual quality.